Courtesy: Reuters, AP
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of blood testing startup Theranos has been jailed for 11 years for defrauding investors. She started her prison sentence on May 30.
Elizabeth Holmes gained prominence after she claimed that Theranos’ small machines could run an array of diagnostic tests with just a few drops of blood. But the technology never came to work.
Forbes had dubbed Elizabeth Holmes as the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire in 2014, and her stake in Theranos was worth $4.5 billion.
Serious flaws in Theranos’ technology were exposed in a series of reports in the Wall Street Journal which Holmes and her former romantic and business partner Ramesh Balwani tried to thwart. The firm collapsed in 2018.
Holmes would serve her 11-year prison sentence at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas. Balwani, meanwhile, was convicted of fraud and conspiracy and is serving a nearly 13-year sentence in a Southern California prison.