Elizabeth Holmes

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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes claimed that her company could perform hundreds of diagnostic tests using just a few drops of blood.

Courtesy of Theranos

Elizabeth Holmes (born February 3, 1984, Washington, D.C.) is an American entrepreneur who was the founder and CEO (2003–18) of the blood-testing company Theranos Inc. In 2014—at age 30—she was dubbed the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, but, less than a year later, it was her own blood that authorities were after, as the nature of her corporate malfeasance became clear.

Simply put, Holmes made grand claims she knew not to be true about her company’s blood-testing technology. In 2018, Holmes was forced to relinquish control of Theranos, and four years later she was convicted of defrauding investors.

Holmes, the daughter of a U.S. government aid worker and a congressional committee staffer, grew up in Washington, D.C., and Houston. An awkward but imaginative child, she had few close friends and spent much of her time alone, reading, designing inventions, and dreaming of changing the world. In high school Holmes participated in a Mandarin immersion trip to Beijing facilitated by Stanford University. While there, she befriended technology entrepreneur Ramesh (“Sunny”) Balwani.

In 2002, she enrolled at Stanford to pursue a degree in electrical and chemical engineering. The university named her a President’s Scholar, awarding her a stipend to create her own research project. As a freshman Holmes persuaded distinguished chemical engineering professor Channing Robertson to hire her in his lab as the only undergraduate working among Ph.D. students.

During a summer break from her studies at Stanford, Holmes took a job at the Genome Institute of Singapore to work on a computer chip designed to detect the presence of the SARS virus in the body. She then became interested in developing more-efficient medical devices that could surpass traditional diagnostic testing and therapeutic assessment. Upon her return to Stanford, Holmes patented a device that attached to a person’s body and measured the effectiveness of a given medication by comparing parameters of chemical markers produced by a diseased region with those of the therapeutic agent.

Holmes reported being sexually assaulted during her time in college and has said that the experience in part led her to drop out and dedicate herself to entrepreneurship. She left Stanford during her sophomore year to launch Theranos, a company devoted to developing minimally invasive laboratory testing services. She founded the company in 2003 and later became chief executive officer. Balwani, 19 years her senior, served as an informal adviser, and the two became romantically involved.

Theranos produced its first offering in 2014, a laboratory testing process that claimed to run more than 1,000 medical tests on a sample of only a few drops of blood. It was a technology that would revolutionize medical data collection—if it worked.

Theranos’s promotional materials, created by marketing professionals including Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris, internationally renowned photographer Martin Schoeller, and the high-profile advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, whose clients include Apple and McDonald’s, maintained that the company was improving laboratory blood collection and testing by miniaturizing and automating the process. Traditional blood testing relies on drawing 0.17–0.34 fluid ounce (5–10 ml) of blood through a large needle to fill one tube for each test requested by a physician. That process is often painful for patients and costly for insurance carriers, and experts worried that the procedure dissuaded patients who were young, elderly, or anxious about needles from getting blood work done in a timely manner. As laboratory data is one of the key tools physicians use to help patients make informed decisions about care, a less painful, less expensive blood-testing method could ease the diagnostic process and thus ensure that more patients receive necessary care.

Between 2003 and 2014 Holmes grew Theranos by securing funding from investors, building infrastructure, and developing the company’s proprietary processes in secret. In meetings she lowered the pitch of her voice and wore shoulder pads to come across as more authoritative. She wore black turtlenecks in photographs and adopted several health-related quirks, including drinking green juice. Holmes promoted not just the image of her company but also her own image as an ambitious and confident college-dropout entrepreneur, leveraging Steve Jobs’s cultural capital to align herself with his innovative success. Like Jobs, she instituted intensive measures of secrecy and security regarding most aspects of production.

In 2009, her then-partner Balwani formally joined the company as president and chief operating officer, despite his lack of a scientific background. Four years later Walgreens, which owned more than 8,000 drugstores in the U.S., announced that it had partnered with Theranos to establish wellness centers inside its pharmacies.

By 2014, Theranos offered diagnostic tests for more than 200 conditions, was licensed to operate in almost all U.S. states, and held a certification from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal regulator overseeing medical laboratories. In 2014, Forbes magazine named Holmes one of the richest women in America, valuing her personal wealth at $4.5 billion and her company at $9 billion.

The idea of making blood testing easier, less painful, and cheaper was so appealing that few questioned if Theranos’s proposed solution was too good to be true. Holmes, with her youthful ingenuity and domineering leadership style, was the darling of Silicon Valley, the hyper-professional “it girl,” and the eye of a hurricane of self-perpetuating hype. Once one billionaire trusted her, others fell in line.

In 2015, low-level Theranos employees Erika Cheung and Tyler Shultz, grandson of former U.S. secretary of state and major Theranos investor George P. Shultz, noticed that other employees were tampering with statistical data and test results from Theranos’s main proprietary technology, the allegedly revolutionary Edison machine. The two became major whistleblowers, sharing their concerns with the Wall Street Journal. Shortly after, John Carreyrou, a reporter at the Journal, published an article detailing the company’s technological shortcomings. He reported that the Edison was being used for only a fraction of the company’s tests and produced unreliable results, despite Holmes’s repeated claims to the contrary. Carreyrou also revealed that Theranos scientist Ian Gibbons had died by suicide in 2013 after struggling with the pressures of working for Holmes.

Other questions concerning the company and its secretive processes soon surfaced. Theranos was criticized for releasing aggregate testing data, which could obscure statistical shortcomings more effectively than primary testing data, and faced U.S. Food and Drug Administration scrutiny over its blood-testing technology. FDA inspectors found that Theranos had improperly classified its nanotainer blood-collection vial as a Class I medical device; the FDA subsequently determined that it was a Class II device. Theranos also faced compliance problems at its Newark, California, laboratory and criticism for failing to subject its technologies to scientific peer review.

In June 2016, Forbes revised its estimate of net worth to $0. The following month, CMS notified Theranos that the company had failed to provide adequate documentation showing that it had corrected its previous errors and was complying with federal regulations, and thus CMS blocked Theranos from receiving reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid and forbade Holmes from possessing or operating a medical laboratory for two years.

In March 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Holmes and Balwani with fraud for allegedly taking more than $700 million from investors while advertising a false product. Holmes settled the charges with the SEC by agreeing to pay a $500,000 penalty, surrender nearly 19 million Theranos shares, relinquish voting control of the company, and accept a 10-year ban on serving as an officer or director of a public company. Holmes and Theranos neither admitted nor denied the SEC’s allegations.

In June 2018, however, she and Balwani were indicted by federal authorities on wire fraud charges. That same day Holmes stepped down as CEO, and later that year Theranos ceased operations. Holmes and Balwani, who had been romantically involved for more than a decade, separated as Theranos faced mounting legal and regulatory problems. Holmes has alleged that Balwani controlled and abused her during their relationship.

Theranos’s collapse resulted in substantial losses for private investors—the company was never publicly traded—and medical harm to patients who relied on its inaccurate blood tests.

Beginning in August 2021, Holmes was tried in a federal court on 11 counts of fraud, and in January 2022, she was convicted on four counts of defrauding investors: three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The jury found her not guilty on four counts of defrauding patients, and it failed to reach a verdict on the remaining counts. Holmes has maintained her innocence.

Later in 2022, Balwani went to trial, and he was also found guilty of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. In November 2022, Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison. She began serving her sentence on May 30, 2023, at the Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Bryan, Texas.

In March 2026, a federal judge reduced her sentence to 10 years and three months under a retroactive change to federal sentencing guidelines. As of September 2026, the Federal Bureau of Prisons lists her projected release date as February 22, 2030.

Holmes’s story has received no shortage of media attention. In 2018, Carreyrou released an investigative nonfiction book chronicling Theranos’s secrets, and Holmes later became the subject of documentaries, an ABC podcast, and the Hulu limited series The Dropout (2022).

In 2026, You Can See Everything, a documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim made with Holmes’s participation, premiered in a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival. Released theatrically in October, the film follows Holmes in the weeks before she entered prison and two years into her sentence. It attracted widespread attention, becoming one of the highest-grossing documentaries of the 21st century.