Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes arrives to begin serving her prison sentence for defrauding investors in the failed blood-testing startup, at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, May 30, 2023.
Go Nakamura | Reuters
Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison Tuesday to begin her more than 11-year sentence for defrauding investors about the capabilities of her company’s blood-testing technology.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila ordered Holmes to surrender no later than 2 p.m. local time Tuesday at a minimum-security facility in Bryan, Texas, in a ruling earlier this month. The ruling followed a day after an appeals court rejected Holmes’ bid to stay out of prison while she appeals her conviction.
Holmes, 39, has two young children with her current partner, William “Billy” Evans. Her second child was born earlier this year after her sentencing in November 2022.
A federal jury in San Jose, California, convicted Holmes on four counts of defrauding investors in Theranos, the company she dropped out of Stanford University to found in 2003. In another ruling this month, Davila ordered Holmes and former Theranos executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani pay $452 million in restitution to victims.
Balwani and Holmes, former romantic partners, helmed Theranos during its meteoric rise. At its peak, Theranos was valued at more than $9 billion and attracted backers ranging from the DeVos family to news magnate Rupert Murdoch. It was one of Murdoch’s publications, The Wall Street Journal, that first reported on irregularities with Theranos’ supposedly revolutionary blood-testing machines.
Balwani was convicted on 12 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He is serving his nearly 13-year sentence in a prison in Southern California.
Holmes’ saga began when she dreamed of running hundreds of laboratory tests with just a finger prick of blood. The idea was to make blood tests cheaper, more convenient and accessible to consumers, but Theranos’ technology ultimately proved to be faulty and unreliable.
Patients were given inaccurate test results relating to conditions such as HIV, cancer and miscarriages. In closing arguments during Holmes’ trial, prosecutors argued she “chose fraud” over “failure.”
