This week, the trial for Elizabeth Holmes–the 37-year-old former chief executive officer of Theranos which is now a disbanded Silicon Valley-based company that federal prosecutors accused with various fraud charges — continues this week.
Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the company’s former presidentand Chief Operating Officerand Holmes his former lover is also facing fraud charges. The trial is set to begin in January 2022.
The charges were made following allegations that Holmes and Balwani engaged in a “multi-million-dollar scheme” to defraud investors as well as a separate scheme to defraud doctors and patients to promote Theranos and its allegedly innovative technologies, according to the U.S. Department of Justice
Holmes denies any wrongdoing and blames any wrongdoing on Bulwani. As per court records, Holmes’ lawyers alleged she was misled by Bulwani, who was the ex- Theranos president. Bulwani’s lawyer strongly denied the assertion.
Who is Elizabeth Holmes?
Holmes was born into an upper-class household located in Washington, D.C. and her parents were “very interested in status” and “lived for connections,” according to Richard Fuisz, 81, who was a member of the same family as Holmes’s. Holmes family. Fuisz speculated that Holmes could have had to deal with many pressures to be successful in her youth.
According to people who knew her, when she was a young girl Holmes was polite, but reserved. When she was nine she wrote an email to her father, describing her goals for the future “really want[ed] out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn’t know was possible to do,” Fuisz said.
She was a student at Stanford University in 2002 to learn about chemical engineering. However, she left within a year in the year 19 and founded Theranos on the 1st of March, 2003. The company’s stated goal consisted of “revolutionize medical laboratory testing,” according to the Department of Justice.
The Dr. Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School who met Holmes for lunch in 2015 at the peak of her company’s success and apprehensions, told the BBC in Augustthat “She was confident and self-assured. However, as I went to ask her many questions regarding her technology, she did not appear to be able to comprehend.
“It seemed a bit odd but I didn’t come away thinking it was a fraud,” said Flier who hasn’t evaluated Theranos’ technology in a formal manner.
Also Read: Coinbase user lost $12 million in Bitcoin through a trick notification
What’s Elizabeth Holmes’ Net Worth?
securing investors with high profile, such as the former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (who became a Theranos board member) and billionaires such as the media mafiast Rupert Murdoch and the Waltons (the family that owns Walmart), Theranos increased in value to be worth $9 billion.
At one point, she was called “the next Steve Jobs” by Inc. magazine, Holmes was profiled in Forbes on the 15th of May 2015, as being the most youthful self-made billionaire. Her worth was around $4.5 billion at the time.
The same year, she was ranked No. one on Forbes’ list of America’s Self-Made Females and was placed in sixth in the magazine’s rankings of the America’s most successful entrepreneurs under 40.