Theranos fraud: Here are 10 things you should know about Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, has been making the headlines since 2013, initially for good reasons but then things changed over the years. The 39-year-old American entrepreneur has been convicted of fraud and sentenced to 11 years in prison which begins today. Here are 12 things you should probably know about Holmes:

1. Elizabeth Anne Holmes was born on February 3, 1984, in Washington DC. Her mother, Noel Holmes, worked for a Congressional committee, while her father, Christian Holmes, worked as the vice president of Enron which later went bankrupt.

2. Holmes is a Stanford dropout and has a fear of needles. At 19, this fear led to the origin of Theranos in 2003. Theranos, is a private healthcare technology company that claimed to revolutionisethe blood-testing industry, as Holmes claimed that her fear of needlesacted as a motivation for her company. The company's name is a combination of 'Therapy and 'Diagnosis.' The company was initially named Real-Time Curses.

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3. Holmes is an admirer of Apple founder Steve Jobs and has deliberately copied his style of wearing a black turtleneck sweater frequently.

4. Holmes is married to Billy Evans and the couple has two children.

5. Elizabeth follows a strict lifestyle. She is a vegan and her meals area blended concoction of cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery.

6. In 2015, Forbes named Holmes as the 'youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire' in the United States on the basis of her company's valuation of $9 billion.

7. Holmes was in a relationship with the company's COO Sunny Ramesh Balwani.

8. Theranos'decline began in 2015 after several journalistic and regulatory investigations blew the whistle on the company's claims and said that Holmes might have misled the government and investors.

9. A federal US grand jury indicted Holmes and Balwani on nine counts of fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The two collected a massive fund worth $700 million from investors over false and exaggerated claims. Holmes paid a $500,000 fine and returned $18.9 million shares to the company, relinquished her voting control of Theranos, and accepteda ten-year ban from serving as an officer or director of a public company.

10. After claims about Theranos began to surface, Forbes revised Holmes's estimated net worth to zero and Fortune named her in its feature article on "The World's 19 Most Disappointing Leaders."

(with inputs from agencies)

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