Who is Elizabeth Holmes? Rise and Fall of Theranos CEO

Elizabeth Anne Holmes, formerly a prominent American businesswoman, was the founder and CEO of Theranos, a health technology company that is now defunct. With a company valuation of $9 billion, Holmes was included in Forbes’ 2015 list of the wealthiest self-made female billionaires in the United States.

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However, the following year, her company was exposed as a fraud and its claims were debunked, causing Forbes to revise their estimate of Holmes’ net worth to zero and naming her as one of the “World’s Most Disappointing Leaders.”

Elizabeth Holmes’s Biography

Name	Elizabeth Holmes
Full Name	Elizabeth Anne Holmes
Net Worth	$4.5 Billion
Date of Birth	3 February 1984
Age	39 Years Old
Birth Place	Washington, D.C., United States
Currently Live In	San Francisco
Profession	Businesswoman
Nationality	American
Religion	Christian
Ethnicity	Caucasian
Hometown	San Francisco
Zodiac Sign	Aquarius
School/High School	St. John’s School in Houston
College/University	Stanford University in United States
Education Qualification	Chemical Engineering

Personal Life

Elizabeth Holmes was born on February 3, 1984, in Washington, D.C., United States. Her parents, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV and Noel Holmes, both worked in government agencies. Christian was a vice president at the now-bankrupt energy company Enron and later held senior positions in agencies such as USAID, EPA, and USTDA. He is of part Danish ancestry and has a famous ancestor, Charles Louis Fleischmann, who founded Fleischmann’s Yeast.

During high school, Elizabeth developed an interest in computer programming and started her first business selling C++ compilers to universities in China. She also worked in a laboratory at the Singapore Genome Institute testing for SARS-CoV-1. In 2003, she filed her first patent application for a wearable medical chip.

Elizabeth reported that she was raped at Stanford University in 2003. The following year, she dropped out of Stanford’s School of Engineering and used her tuition money as seed funding to start a consumer healthcare technology company.

Family, Boyfriend & Relationships

Elizabeth Holmes was born to Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, who worked as a vice president at energy company Enron before holding executive positions in various government agencies, including USAID, the EPA, and USTDA. Her mother is Noel Anne (nee Daoust), a former Congressional committee staffer. She also has a brother named Christian Holmes V, who is a vice president at Enron.

Elizabeth Holmes is married to Billy Evans, an umpire, and they got married in mid-2019 in a private ceremony. They have a son named William Holmes Evans, and they currently reside in San Francisco.

Previously, Holmes was involved with technology entrepreneur Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who was born in Pakistan and immigrated to India and then the US in 2002. Despite the fact that Balwani was married to another woman, he and Holmes began a romantic relationship in 2003. The couple lived together in an apartment starting in 2005, but Balwani left or was fired from Theranos in 2016.

Career

Elizabeth Holmes founded Real-Time Cures in Palo Alto, California in 2003 with the goal of democratizing healthcare. Holmes, who was motivated by her fear of needles, attempted to perform blood tests using only small amounts of blood. However, her idea was met with skepticism by experienced medical professors who told her that it was impossible. Undeterred, Holmes managed to gain the support of her advisor and the dean of the engineering school at Stanford University, Channing Robertson.

Holmes renamed the company Theranos in 2003 and modeled her image after Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, often wearing a black sweater. She also spoke in a deep baritone voice during most of her public appearances, although a former colleague claimed he heard her speak in a higher, more typical female voice. By December 2004, she had raised $6 million to finance the project, and by the end of 2010, Theranos had received over $92 million in venture capital.

In July 2011, Holmes met with former Secretary of State George Shultz, who joined the Theranos board of directors after a two-hour meeting. Over the next three years, Holmes was recognized for forming “the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history.” The company operated in stealth mode until September 2013, when it announced a partnership with Walgreens to launch in-store blood sample collection centers. Holmes was interviewed by Medscape’s editor-in-chief, Eric Topol, who praised her for the “phenomenal rebooting of laboratory medicine.”

In 2014, media attention intensified when Holmes graced the covers of various prominent publications, including Fortune, Forbes, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Inc. Forbes named her the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, ranking her #110 on the Forbes 400 in 2014. At this point, Theranos was valued at $9 billion and had garnered more than $400 million in venture capital. By the end of 2014, Holmes had her name on 18 U.S. patents and 66 foreign patents. In 2015, Theranos formed partnerships with Cleveland Clinic, Capital Blue Cross, and AmeriHealth Caritas to employ its technology.

John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal initiated a covert investigation of Theranos that lasted for several months after he received a tip from a medical expert who was suspicious of Theranos’s Edison blood testing device. Carreyrou spoke with whistleblowers who were former employees and obtained company documents. When Holmes learned of the investigation, she and her lawyer David Boies started a campaign to prevent Carreyrou from publishing, including legal and financial threats against both the Journal and the whistleblowers.

Despite Boies’s legal threats and strong-arm tactics, the Journal published Carreyrou’s “bombshell article” in October 2015, revealing that the Edison device was producing inaccurate results and that the company had been using commercially available machines made by other companies for most of its testing. Carreyrou continued to report problems with the company and Holmes’s conduct in a series of articles.

In 2018, he published a book titled Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, which chronicled his investigation of Theranos. Holmes denied all the allegations, calling the Journal a “tabloid” and promising to publish data on the accuracy of its tests. She appeared on CNBC’s Mad Money the same evening the article was published, where Jim Cramer called the article “pretty brutal.” Holmes responded, “This is what happens when you work to change things. First, they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world.”

In January 2016, after inspecting Theranos’s Newark, California laboratory, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent a warning letter to the company due to irregularities with staff proficiency, procedures, and equipment. After the company failed to address issues at its California lab in March 2016, CMS regulators proposed a two-year ban on Holmes from owning or operating a certified clinical laboratory. In an interview on The Today Show, Holmes expressed disappointment and promised to rebuild the lab with help from a new scientific and medical advisory board.

In July 2016, CMS prohibited Holmes from owning, operating, or directing a blood-testing service for two years. Theranos appealed the decision to the US Health and Human Services Board of Appeals. Soon after, Walgreens terminated its relationship with Theranos and closed its in-store blood collection centers. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also directed the company to cease using the capillary tube Nanotainer device, one of its main innovations.

Theranos faced legal action in 2017 when Arizona filed a lawsuit accusing the company of hiding or misrepresenting information regarding 1.5 million blood tests sold to Arizonans. The lawsuit was settled in April 2017, with Theranos reimbursing consumers for test costs, paying $225,000 in civil penalties and attorneys’ fees, totaling $4.65 million. Holmes denied any wrongdoing. There were also reports of an ongoing FBI investigation and two group payment fraud lawsuits.

In May 2017, Theranos shareholders agreed to drop all litigation and potential litigation against preferred stock, with Holmes compensating non-participating shareholders for the decline in share value by releasing some of her shares. In March 2018, the SEC charged Holmes and former Theranos chairman Ramesh Balwan with fraud for defrauding investors of over $700 million by promoting a fake product. Holmes settled the SEC lawsuit on March 14, 2018, giving up her voting rights in Theranos, returning 18.9 million shares to the company, and receiving a 10-year ban from serving as an officer or director of a public company, and a $500,000 fine.

Theranos had over 800 employees at its peak in 2015, but in October 2016, 340 people were laid off, and another 155 people were laid off in January 2017. In April 2018, the company filed a WARN Act notice, announcing plans to lay off 105 employees permanently, leaving fewer than two dozen employees. Most of the remaining employees were laid off in August 2018. On September 5, 2018, Theranos began the formal liquidation process, and the remaining money and assets were distributed to creditors.

Rise and Fall of Theranos CEO

At the age of 19, Elizabeth Holmes left Stanford University to launch Theranos, a blood-testing startup that was initially hailed as a revolutionary technology. Holmes was praised as the next Steve Jobs, and the company’s valuation soared to $9 billion. However, the technology’s flaws were eventually exposed, leading to fraud charges against Holmes.

Networth

Prior to the March 2018 settlement, Elizabeth Holmes held a 50% stake in Theranos. In 2015, Forbes recognized her as one of America’s wealthiest self-made women, with a net worth of $4.5 billion. However, an updated valuation of the company in June 2016 by Forbes, which estimated its worth at $800 million, rendered her investment worthless due to the preference of other investors who owned preferred stock. Despite this setback, Holmes reportedly owes Theranos $25 million as a result of exercising her stock options. She did not profit from this arrangement, nor did she sell her shares, which included debt-related shares.