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Elizabeth Anne Holmes (born February 3, 1984) is an American businesswoman convicted of fraud in connection with her health technology company Theranos. Holmes founded Theranos in 2003, and its valuation soared in the early 2010s after it claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing methods that needed only very small volumes of blood, such as from a fingerprick. In 2015, Forbes named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the United States on the basis of a $9 billion valuation of Theranos. In the following year, as accusations of fraud about Theranos's claims began to surface, Forbes revised its estimate of Holmes's net worth to zero, and Fortune named her in its feature article on "The World's 19 Most Disappointing Leaders".

The decline of Theranos began in 2015, when a series of journalistic and regulatory investigations revealed doubts about the company's claims and whether Holmes had been truthful with investors and the government. In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Theranos, Holmes, and former Theranos chief operating officer (COO) Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani with raising $700 million from investors through a fraud involving false or exaggerated claims about the accuracy of the company's blood-testing technology; Holmes settled the charges by paying a $500,000 no admit no deny (NAND) fine, returning 18.9 million shares to the company, relinquishing her voting control of Theranos, and accepting a ten-year ban from serving as an officer or director of a public company.

Holmes was in a clandestine romantic relationship with Balwani throughout most of Theranos's history. Holmes and Balwani jointly ran the company with a "dysfunctional corporate culture" of "secrecy and fear" according to employees. Staff also claimed that those who "raised concerns or objections" were "usually marginalized or fired" by the pair. Following the collapse of Theranos, Holmes started dating hotel heir William "Billy" Evans, with whom she has had two children (born in 2021 and 2023). Their relationship is documented in the 2026 film You Can See Everything, which was produced with Holmes's participation.

A federal grand jury indicted Holmes and Balwani on fraud charges in June 2018. Her trial in the case of U.S. v. Holmes, et al. ended in January 2022 when Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors and acquitted of defrauding patients. She was sentenced to serve 11+1⁄4 years at Federal Prison Camp, Bryan, beginning on May 30, 2023. She and Balwani were ordered to pay $452 million in restitution to the victims of the fraud. The credibility of Theranos was attributed in part to Holmes's personal connections and ability to recruit the support of influential people, including Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Jim Mattis, and Betsy DeVos, all of whom had served or went on to serve as U.S. presidential cabinet officials.

Early life

Elizabeth Anne Holmes was born on February 3, 1984, in Washington, D.C. Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was a vice president at a subsidiary of Enron called Clean Energy Solutions Group. Her mother, Noel Anne (née Daoust), worked as a Congressional committee staffer. Christian later held executive positions in government agencies such as USAID, the EPA, and USTDA. Holmes is partly of Danish ancestry. One of her paternal great-great-great-grandfathers was Charles Louis Fleischmann, a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant to the United States who founded Fleischmann's Yeast. The Holmes family "was very proud of its yeast empire" history, according to family friend Joseph Fuisz: "I think the parents very much yearned for the days of yore when the family was one of the richest in America. And I think Elizabeth channeled that, and at a young age." Her great-grandfather Christian R. Holmes II was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (United States) in World War I and had wild-animal collections in California and Hawaii.

Holmes graduated from high school at St. John's School in Houston. During high school, she was interested in computer programming and says she started her first business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities. Her parents had arranged Mandarin Chinese home tutoring, and partway through high school, Holmes began attending Stanford University's summer Mandarin program.

In 2002, Holmes attended Stanford, where she studied chemical engineering and worked as a student researcher and laboratory assistant in the Stanford School of Engineering. She was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta at Stanford. After the end of her freshman year, Holmes worked in a laboratory at the Genome Institute of Singapore and tested for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) through the collection of blood samples with syringes. She filed her first patent application on a wearable drug-delivery patch in 2003.

Holmes reported that she was raped at Stanford in 2003. According to a police report filed on the evening of October 5, 2003, Holmes called police and reported that she had been sexually assaulted at a fraternity house at Stanford between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. that morning. In March 2004, she dropped out of Stanford's School of Engineering and used her tuition money as seed funding for a consumer healthcare technology company.

Founding

In 2003, Holmes founded the company Real-Time Cures in Palo Alto, California, to "democratize healthcare". Holmes described her fear of needles as a motivation and sought to perform blood tests using only small amounts of blood. Holmes pitched the idea to reap "vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived from the tip of a finger" to medicine professor Phyllis Gardner at Stanford, who responded, "I don't think your idea is going to work", explaining that it was impossible to do what Holmes was claiming could be done due to the limited blood samples. Several other expert medical professors told Holmes the same thing. However, Holmes did not relent, and she succeeded in getting her advisor and dean at the School of Engineering, Channing Robertson, to back her idea. In 2003, Holmes renamed the company Theranos (a combination of the words "therapy" and "diagnosis"). The company's original name, "Real-Time Cures", was changed after deciding that too many people were skeptical of the word "cure". Robertson became the company's first board member and introduced Holmes to venture capitalists.

Funding and expansion

By December 2004, Holmes had raised $6 million to fund the firm. By the end of 2010, Theranos had more than $92 million in venture capital. In July 2011, Holmes was introduced to former secretary of state George Shultz. After a two-hour meeting, he joined the Theranos board of directors. Holmes was recognized for forming "the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history" over the next three years.

Under Holmes, Theranos was known for its secrecy. In September 2013, the company announced a partnership with Walgreens to launch in-store blood sample collection centers. She was interviewed for Medscape by its editor-in-chief, Eric Topol, who praised her for "this phenomenal rebooting of laboratory medicine". Media attention increased in 2014, when Holmes appeared on the covers of Fortune, Forbes, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Inc.

Forbes recognized Holmes as the world's youngest self-made female billionaire and ranked her on the Forbes 400 in 2014. Theranos was valued at $9 billion and had raised more than $400 million in venture capital. By the end of 2014, her name appeared on 18 U.S. patents and 66 foreign patents. During 2015, Holmes established agreements with Cleveland Clinic, Capital Blue Cross, and AmeriHealth Caritas to use Theranos technology.

Downfall

John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal initiated a secret, months-long investigation of Theranos after he received a tip from a medical expert who thought that Theranos's Edison blood testing device seemed suspicious. Carreyrou spoke to…