Elizabeth Holmes – Theranos
She dressed like Steve Jobs and peddled fake bogus blood-testing technology. Even Rupert Murdoch fell for her.
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was a lauded Silicon Valley medical entrepreneur yet all she left in her wake was a bloody mess.
She was convicted in January 2022 for defrauding her investors out of more than $100 million, and she is not scheduled to be released from federal prison until March 2032 after losing her appeal in February 2025.
Her former boyfriend and top lieutenant, Ramesh Balwani, received a 13-year prison sentence for the scheme. They’ve both been ordered to pay $452 million in restitution.
Holmes claimed Theranos was developing a blood testing device that could detect a wide range of illnesses from just a tiny drop of blood. Her story came apart when a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that her company was using commercially available devices for its test results.
At its zenith in 2015, Theranos had more than 800 employees.
Holmes put on a big act that included faking a deeper voice and wearing black turtlenecks like Steve Jobs. “I believed it would be how I would be … taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn’t have good technical ideas,” she said in a 2023 New York Times interview.
She was brilliant at leveraging connections and her affectations duped an astonishing list of people who should have known better.
Her board included former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger. Also on the board was former CEOs Dick Kovacevich of Wells Fargo and Riley Bechtel of Bechtel, among other luminaries. Her major investors included Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the Walton family of Walmart fame.
It is simply embarrassing how many aristocrats, media outlets and institutions fawned over Holmes, who if nothing else proved that Silicon Valley will buy anything.
Among myriad honors: Time Magazine named Holmes among its 100 most influential people. The Harvard Medical School put her on its board of fellows. Pepperdine University awarded her an honorary doctorate. Forbes ranked her No. 73 in its list of “the world’s most powerful women.” She became the youngest recipient of the 2015 Horatio Alger Award honoring distinguished Americans. And President Barack Obama named her Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship.
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Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was once a vice president at Enron. Go figure.
Following Holmes’ conviction, Murdoch, who invested $125 million in Theranos, reportedly sent an email to The Wall Street Journal. In it, he called himself “one of a bunch of old men taken in by a seemingly great young woman! Total embarrassment.”