Elizabeth Holmes

Holmes met technology entrepreneur Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani during a Stanford Mandarin program in Beijing. They became romantically involved and lived together, and Balwani later joined Theranos as its president and chief operating officer. Their personal relationship and business partnership ended during the company's collapse in 2016.

Holmes married entrepreneur Billy Evans in 2019. They have two children, William, born in 2021, and Invicta, born in 2023.

Elizabeth Anne Holmes was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Washington and Houston. Her father, Christian Holmes, worked for Enron and later held positions with government agencies including USAID, while her mother, Noel Holmes, was a congressional committee staffer. Holmes developed an early interest in science, technology, and Mandarin Chinese, and while still in high school she sold C++ compilers to Chinese universities.

Holmes enrolled at Stanford University in 2002 to study chemical engineering. She became a President's Scholar and worked in the laboratory of professor Channing Robertson. During a summer at the Genome Institute of Singapore, she worked on research related to detecting SARS. She filed a patent application for a wearable drug-delivery and monitoring device in 2003, then left Stanford at age 19 to pursue her company.

Holmes founded Real-Time Cures in 2003 and later renamed it Theranos, combining the words “therapy” and “diagnosis.” The company pursued minimally invasive blood testing, using a finger prick and a small container called a nanotainer rather than conventional blood draws. Holmes promoted the idea that the system could perform a large number of medical tests from only a few drops of blood.

Theranos operated in secret for much of its first decade. Channing Robertson became an early board member, and investors and influential board members helped Holmes expand the company. In 2013, Theranos announced a partnership with Walgreens to establish blood-collection centers in its pharmacies. By 2014, the company offered tests for more than 200 conditions and Holmes had become a major subject of business and technology media coverage.

Holmes cultivated an image associated with Steve Jobs, including black turtlenecks and a carefully controlled public persona. Her deep speaking voice also became a prominent part of that image, although she later acknowledged that the lower voice was an affectation.

In 2015, former employees Erika Cheung and Tyler Shultz raised concerns about Theranos's testing practices and shared information with journalist John Carreyrou. Carreyrou's investigation for The Wall Street Journal found that the Edison machine produced unreliable results and that Theranos used conventional commercial laboratory machines for much of its testing despite presenting the Edison as the basis of its system.

Federal regulators investigated the company, citing problems with its laboratory procedures, equipment, and compliance. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services barred Holmes from owning or operating a laboratory for two years, while Walgreens ended its relationship with Theranos. Holmes settled civil fraud charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018, relinquishing control of Theranos and accepting a ten-year ban from serving as an officer or director of a public company. Theranos shut down and began dissolving later that year.

A federal grand jury indicted Holmes and Balwani in 2018 on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Holmes's trial began in 2021, and she testified in her own defense for seven days. In January 2022, a jury convicted her on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to defraud investors. She was acquitted on charges involving patients, while the jury did not reach verdicts on several other counts.

Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and three months in federal prison and began serving her sentence in 2023. Her case became the subject of John Carreyrou's book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, the ABC podcast The Dropout, and Hulu's limited series The Dropout, in which Amanda Seyfried portrayed Holmes.