Elizabeth Holmes

Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 and served as its chief executive officer from then until 2018. She was 19 when she founded the company and left Stanford University as a sophomore in March 2004; the company’s name combines the words “therapy” and “diagnosis.”⁠[1][2]

In September 2009, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani guaranteed a $10 million loan for Theranos and took a formal role at the company, later becoming its president and chief operating officer. In 2010, Theranos partnered with WalgreensWalgreensWalgreens is an American retail pharmacy chain founded in 1901 that offers prescription filling, vaccinations, health services and everyday retail goods. Its operating company, Walgreen Co., was formerly part of Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) and became an independently operated private company after Sycamore Partners completed its acquisition in 2025.Open the full entry to use Theranos’s proprietary device to conduct patient tests in Walgreens pharmacies.⁠[2][1]

In September 2013, Theranos and Walgreens announced a long-term partnership, and the first Theranos Wellness Center opened in a Walgreens store in Palo Alto; the testing machines were later rolled out to Walgreens stores in California and Arizona. Theranos was at one point valued at more than $9 billion.⁠[2][3]

In October 2015, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation questioning Theranos’s testing technology; the story was first broken by its reporter John Carreyrou. Theranos called the reporting “factually and scientifically erroneous,” but then stopped using its proprietary vials for all tests except its herpes test.⁠[2]

In late 2015, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that oversees clinical laboratories, conducted an unannounced inspection of the Theranos laboratory and reported deficiencies that posed “immediate jeopardy” to patient health, identifying quality-control failures involving the Edison device and modified third-party devices.⁠[1]

In January 2016, CMS said Theranos’s California laboratory did not meet federal standards; in March, CMS proposed barring Holmes and Balwani from the laboratory business for two years. In May 2016, Balwani left the company, and Theranos voided two years of blood-test results and corrected tens of thousands of test reports.⁠[2]

In July 2016, a CMS letter made public revoked the certification of Theranos’s laboratory in Newark, California, cancelled its approval to receive Medicare payments, and barred Holmes from owning or operating a laboratory for at least two years; the company also faced a fine of $10,000 for each day it remained out of compliance, starting July 12. Theranos said it accepted “full responsibility,” that Holmes would continue to lead the company, and denied that patients had been harmed.⁠[4]

On March 14, 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Theranos, Holmes and former president Balwani with raising more than $700 million from investors through false statements about the company’s technology, business and financial performance; the SEC said the company’s portable analyzer could run only a few tests, that it falsely claimed the U.S. Department of Defense had deployed its technology, and that it projected more than $100 million in 2014 revenue when actual revenue was just over $100,000. Without admitting or denying the allegations, Holmes agreed to settle, paying a $500,000 penalty, accepting a 10-year bar from serving as an officer or director of a public company, returning 18.9 million shares and giving up voting control by converting her Class B shares to Class A shares; Balwani did not settle.⁠[5]

On June 15, 2018, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California announced an indictment of Holmes and Balwani on two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud, covering one scheme to defraud investors and a separate scheme to defraud doctors and patients. Both pleaded not guilty. Holmes stepped down as chief executive officer and was replaced by David Taylor, while remaining chair of the board.⁠[6][2]

In September 2018, Taylor announced that Theranos would dissolve after using its remaining cash to pay creditors.⁠[7]

Holmes’s criminal trial began with jury selection in San Jose in August 2021; she and Balwani were tried separately, and her trial lasted nearly four months. Holmes testified for more than 20 hours, and the jury deliberated for more than 50 hours over seven days.⁠[2][1][3]

On January 3, 2022, the jury found Holmes guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and three counts of wire fraud, all involving investors; she was acquitted of four patient-related counts (one conspiracy count and three wire-fraud counts), and the jury deadlocked on three further investor wire-fraud counts. The government had dismissed one patient-related count during the trial.⁠[3][1]

On November 18, 2022, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila sentenced Holmes to 135 months (more than 11 years) in prison and ordered her to report to prison on April 27, 2023. Before sentencing, the court received more than 130 letters in her support.⁠[8][1]

In May 2023, the court ordered Holmes and Balwani, jointly and severally, to pay $452 million in restitution, including $397 million to twelve investor victims and $54.5 million to Safeway and Walgreens.⁠[1]

Around midday on May 30, 2023, Holmes arrived at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, a minimum-security federal prison camp for women.⁠[9]

In July 2023, Federal Bureau of Prisons records showed Holmes’s projected release date as December 29, 2032, about two years shorter than her initial sentence; the Bureau did not explain the change.⁠[10]

On February 24, 2025, a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit panel of Mary M. Schroeder, Jacqueline H. Nguyen and Ryan D. Nelson affirmed the convictions and sentences of Holmes and Balwani and the $452 million restitution order, in an opinion written by Nguyen. The court found that the district court should have credited the residual value of the shares, but held the error harmless because the victims could not sell their shares.⁠[1]

Holmes returned to X in 2025, and the account became markedly active from September that year; its bio reads “Mostly my words, posted by others,” and who operates it has not been confirmed. By January 2026, the account had made more than 4,400 posts, covering political figures, life in prison and statements maintaining her innocence.⁠[11]

Information made public in January 2026 showed that Holmes had asked the Trump administration in 2025, through the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, to commute her sentence, and that the request was pending; the Federal Bureau of Prisons website then listed her release date as December 30, 2031. Holmes wrote on X that she would continue “to fight for my innocence” and that “This is not over.”⁠[12][13]

On March 26, 2026, the federal judge who had sentenced Holmes reduced her prison term of about 11 years and 3 months by one year, under a 2023 sentencing-guidelines change allowing first-time offenders with no prior criminal history to serve less time for some non-violent crimes.⁠[14]

On September 6, 2026, You Can See Everything, a documentary about Holmes co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in an unannounced screening at which audience phones were locked away; the film runs nearly three hours. It follows Holmes and her partner Billy EvansBilly EvansBilly Evans is an American entrepreneur, the chief executive officer of the diagnostics start-up Haemanthus and the partner of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who appears in the 2026 A24 documentary You Can See Everything.Open the full entry in the 34 days before she reported to prison; A24’s synopsis says it begins as an “intimate portrait” and becomes a three-year journey. Oppenheim said Holmes and Evans pitched the project to A24.⁠[15][16][17][18]

In September 2026, the U.S. Justice Department’s Victim Notification System showed that Holmes was scheduled to be placed at the Austin Transitional Center, a halfway house in Del Valle, Texas, on August 23, 2027, with a scheduled release date of February 22, 2030. Her sentence had been reduced from 11 years and 3 months to 10 years and 3 months through a retroactive change to the federal sentencing guidelines and earned time under the First Step Act.⁠[19]

On October 16, 2026, A24 released You Can See Everything in U.S. theaters. In his review, critic Justin Chang described Fielder and Holmes as both “masters of manipulation.”⁠[15][20]

X: Public account: https://x.com/ElizabethHolmes (opens in a new window)⁠[11]