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Elizabeth Holmes Profile
Elizabeth Holmes is an American convicted fraudster and former biotechnology entrepreneur. In 2003, Holmes founded and was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Theranos, a now-defunct health technology company that soared in valuation after the company claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing methods that could use surprisingly small volumes of blood, such as from a fingerprick.
Elizabeth Holmes Age
Holmes is 39 years old as of 2023. She was born on 3rd February 1984 in Washington, D.C., United States of America. Furthermore, she celebrates her birthday on the 3rd of February every year.
Elizabeth Holmes Height
She stands at a height of 5 feet 5 inches tall.
Elizabeth Holmes Family
Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was a vice president at Enron, an energy company that later went bankrupt after an accounting fraud scandal. 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. Christian is of part Danish ancestry. Her paternal great-great-great-grandfather was Charles Louis Fleischmann, a Hungarian immigrant who founded the Fleischmann’s Yeast company.
The Holmes family “was very proud of its yeast empire” history, according to a 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 mother was born in Georgia and has French-Canadian ancestry on her father’s side.
Elizabeth Holmes Education
Holmes attended 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 School of Engineering.
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. 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.
Elizabeth Holmes Husband And Son
In early 2019, Holmes became engaged to William “Billy” Evans, a 27-year-old heir to Evans Hotels, a family-owned group of hotels in the San Diego area. In mid-2019, Holmes and Evans reportedly married in a private ceremony. Holmes and Evans have not directly confirmed whether the two are legally married, and several sources continue to refer to him as her “partner” rather than her husband. The couple lives in San Francisco. Holmes gave birth to a son in July 2021. In October 2022, weeks before her sentencing hearing, it was reported she was pregnant again.
Holmes was romantically involved with technology entrepreneur Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, a Pakistani-born Hindu who immigrated to India and then the US. She met him in 2002 during a trip to Beijing as part of Stanford University’s Mandarin program. Holmes was 18 at the time, and had just graduated from high school; Balwani was 19 years older than she was and was married to another woman at the time.
Elizabeth Holmes and Balwani
Balwani divorced his wife in 2002 and became romantically involved with Holmes in 2003, about the same time Holmes dropped out of university. The couple moved into an apartment together in 2005. Although Balwani did not officially join Theranos until 2009, when he was given the title of chief operating officer, he was advising Holmes behind the scenes from the company’s inception.
Holmes and Balwani jointly ran the company with a corporate culture of “secrecy and fear” according to employees. Their romantic relationship was kept secret for much of their time running the company. Balwani left Theranos in 2016 in the wake of investigations. The circumstances of his departure are unclear; Holmes has stated that she fired him, but Balwani says that he left of his own accord
On November 29, 2021, Holmes testified that she had been raped while she was a student at Stanford and that she sought solace from Balwani in the aftermath of the incident. She also said Balwani was very controlling during their romantic relationship, which lasted more than a decade, and at times he berated and sexually abused her.
In her testimony, she stated he also wanted to “kill the person” she was and create a “new Elizabeth”. However, she also testified that Balwani had not forced her to make the false statements to investors, business partners, journalists, and company directors that had been described in the case. In court filings, Balwani has “categorically” denied abuse allegations, calling them “false and inflammatory.”
Elizabeth Holmes Theranos Founding
In 2003, Holmes founded the company Real-Time Cures in Palo Alto, California, to “democratize healthcare”. Holmes described her fear of needles as motivation and sought to perform blood tests using only small amounts of blood. When Holmes pitched the idea to reap “vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived from the tip of a finger” to her medicine professor Phyllis Gardner at Stanford, Gardner responded, “I don’t think your idea is going to work”, explaining it was impossible to do what Holmes was claiming could be done.
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 portmanteau of “therapy” and “diagnosis”). Robertson became the company’s first board member and introduced Holmes to venture capitalists. Holmes was an admirer of Apple founder Steve Jobs and deliberately copied his style, frequently dressing in a black turtleneck sweater, as Jobs did.
Elizabeth Holmes Voice Change
Holmes says her mother dressed her in black turtlenecks when she was young, but an employee says she suggested copying Jobs’s famous Issey Miyake turtleneck look in 2007. During most of her public appearances, she spoke in a deep baritone voice, although a former Theranos colleague later claimed he heard her speak in a voice stereotypical of a woman her age to welcome him when he was hired. Gardner of Stanford also denies that Holmes has a naturally deep voice. Her family, however, has maintained that her deep voice is authentic.
Elizabeth Holmes Theranos
The decline of Theranos began in 2015 when a series of journalistic and regulatory investigations revealed doubts about the company’s technology claims and whether Holmes had misled investors and the government. In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Theranos and Holmes with deceiving investors by “massive fraud” through false or exaggerated claims about the accuracy of the company’s blood-testing technology; Additionally, Holmes settled the charges by paying a $500,000 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.
In June 2018, a federal grand jury indicted Holmes and former Theranos chief operating officer (COO) Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani on fraud charges. Her trial in the U.S. v. Holmes, et al. ended in January 2022 when Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors and acquitted of defrauding patients. On November 18, 2022, she was sentenced to serve 11+1⁄4 years (135 months) in prison.
Elizabeth Holmes Bad Blood
Holmes’s career, the rise and dissolution of her company, and the subsequent fallout are the subject of a book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by The Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou; an HBO documentary feature film, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley; and a Hulu miniseries called The Dropout.
The credibility of Theranos was attributed in part to Holmes’s 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 would go on to serve as U.S. presidential cabinet officials. Holmes was in a clandestine romantic relationship with Balwani during most of Theranos’s history. Following the collapse of Theranos, she started dating hotel heir Billy Evans, with whom she had a son in 2021.
Elizabeth Holmes 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 ex-employee whistleblowers and obtained company documents. When Holmes learned of the investigation, she initiated a campaign through her lawyer David Boies to stop Carreyrou from publishing, which included legal and financial threats against both the Journal and the whistleblowers.
In October 2015, despite Boies’s legal threats and strong-arm tactics, the Journal published Carrey Rou’s “bombshell article” detailing how the Edison device gave inaccurate results and revealing that the company had been using commercially available machines manufactured by other companies for most of its testing.
Elizabeth Holmes CNBC’s Mad Money
Carreyrou continued to report problems with the company and Holmes’s conduct in a series of articles and, in 2018, published a book titled Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, detailing his investigation of Theranos. Holmes denied all the claims, calling the Journal a “tabloid” and promising the company would publish data on the accuracy of its tests.
She appeared on CNBC’s Mad Money the same evening the article was published. Jim Cramer said, “The article was pretty brutal”, to which Holmes responded, “This is what happens when you work to change things, first they think you’re wild, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world.”
Elizabeth Holmes Warning letter
In January 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent a warning letter to Theranos after an inspection of its Newark, California, laboratory uncovered irregularities with staff proficiency, procedures, and equipment. CMS regulators proposed a two-year ban on Holmes from owning or operating a certified clinical laboratory after the company had not fixed problems in its California lab in March 2016. On The Today Show, Holmes said she was “devastated we did not catch and fix these issues faster” and said the lab would be rebuilt with help from a new scientific and medical advisory board.
In July 2016, CMS banned Holmes from owning, operating, or directing a blood-testing service for two years. Theranos appealed that decision to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services appeals board. Shortly after that, Walgreens ended its relationship with Theranos and closed its in-store blood collection centers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also ordered the company to cease the use of its Capillary Tube Nanotainer device, one of its core inventions.
Elizabeth Holmes Suit against Theranos
In 2017, the State of Arizona filed suit against Theranos, alleging that the company had sold 1.5 million blood tests to Arizonans while concealing or misrepresenting important facts about those tests. In April 2017, the company settled the lawsuit by agreeing to refund the cost of the tests to consumers and to pay $225,000 in civil fines and attorney fees, for a total of $4.65 million. Other reported ongoing actions include an unspecified investigation by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and two class action fraud lawsuits. Holmes denied any wrongdoing.
On May 16, 2017, approximately 99 percent of Theranos shareholders reached an agreement with the company to dismiss all current and potential litigation in exchange for shares of preferred stock. Holmes released a portion of her equity to offset any dilution of stock value to non-participating shareholders.
Elizabeth Holmes Net Worth
Holmes has an estimated annual salary of $ 1 Billion to $ 5 Billion earned from her career as a former biotechnology entrepreneur.
Elizabeth Holmes Social Media Platforms
Holmes is very active on her Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook pages. She has 31.8k followers on Twitter, 194k followers on Instagram, and 2.4k followers on Facebook.
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