Theranos founder and former CEO Elizabeth Holmes stops at a security checkpoint as she arrives for trial at the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building in San Jose, California, Dec. 7, 2021.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is expected to report to prison on Tuesday to begin her more than 11-year sentence for deceiving investors about the capabilities of her company’s blood-testing technology.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila ordered Holmes to surrender at the minimum-security facility in Bryan, Texas, by 2 p.m. local time Tuesday in a ruling earlier this month. The ruling came a day after the appeals court rejected Holmes’ plea not to go to jail while she appealed the conviction.
Holmes, 39, has two young children with his current partner, William “Billy” Evans. After being sentenced in November 2022, her second child was born earlier this year.
A federal jury in San Jose, California, found Holmes guilty of four counts of defrauding investors in Theranos, the company she founded in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford University. In another ruling this month, Davila ordered Holmes and former Theranos executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani to pay $452 million in damages to victims.
Former lovers Balwani and Holmes were at the helm during Theranos’ meteoric rise. At its peak, Theranos was valued at more than $9 billion and attracted supporters ranging from the DeVos family to news mogul Rupert Murdoch. The Wall Street Journal, one of Murdoch’s publications, was the first to report the violation of Theranos’ supposedly revolutionary blood-testing machine.
Balwani convicted 12 counts Wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He is serving nearly 13 years in a Southern California prison.
The Sherlock Holmes saga began with her dream of performing hundreds of lab tests with blood from her finger. The idea was to make blood testing cheaper, more convenient, and more accessible to consumers, but Theranos’ technology turned out to be buggy and unreliable.
Patients are getting inaccurate test results related to diseases such as HIV, cancer and miscarriage. In closing arguments during Holmes’ trial, prosecutors argued that she “chosen to defraud” rather than “fail.”