- Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 to start the blood-testing startup Theranos.
- Theranos’ value grew to $9 billion until flaws in the technology were exposed and Holmes was charged with fraud.
- Here’s how Holmes went from precocious child, to ambitious Stanford dropout, to an embattled startup founder now in prison.
Elizabeth Holmes was born on February 3, 1984 in Washington, DC. Her mom, Noel, was a Congressional committee staffer, and her dad, Christian Holmes, worked for Enron before moving to government agencies like USAID.
Source: Elizabeth Holmes/Twitter, CNN, Vanity Fair
Holmes’ family moved when she was young, from Washington, DC to Houston.
Source: Fortune
When she was 7, Holmes tried to invent her own time machine, filling up an entire notebook with detailed engineering drawings. At the age of 9, Holmes told relatives she wanted to be a billionaire when she grew up. Her relatives described her as saying it with the “utmost seriousness and determination.”
Source: CBS News, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
Holmes had an “intense competitive streak” from a young age. She often played Monopoly with her younger brother and cousin, and she would insist on playing until the end, collecting the houses and hotels until she won. If Holmes was losing, she would often storm off. More than once, she ran directly through a screen on the door.
Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
It was during high school that Holmes developed her work ethic, often staying up late to study. She quickly became a straight-A student, and even started her own business: she sold C++ compilers, a type of software that translates computer code, to Chinese schools.
Source: Fortune, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
Holmes started taking Mandarin lessons and part-way through high school, talked her way into being accepted by Stanford University’s summer program, which culminated in a trip to Beijing.
Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
Inspired by her great-great-grandfather Christian Holmes, a surgeon, Holmes decided she wanted to go into medicine. But she discovered early on that she was terrified of needles. Later, she said this influenced her to start Theranos.
Source: San Francisco Business Times
Holmes went to Stanford to study chemical engineering. When she was a freshman, she became a “president’s scholar,” an honor that came with a $3,000 stipend to go toward a research project.
Source: Fortune
Holmes spent the summer after her freshman year interning at the Genome Institute in Singapore. She got the job partly because she spoke Mandarin.
Source: Fortune
As a sophomore, Holmes went to one of her professors, Channing Robertson, and said: “Let’s start a company.” With his blessing, she founded Real-Time Cures, later changing the company’s name to Theranos. Thanks to a typo, early employees’ paychecks actually said “Real-Time Curses.”
Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
Holmes soon filed a patent application for a “medical device for analyte monitoring and drug delivery,” a wearable device that would administer medication, monitor patients’ blood, and adjust the dosage as needed.
Source: Fortune, US Patent Office
By the next semester, Holmes had dropped out of Stanford altogether and was working on Theranos in the basement of a college house.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Theranos’s business model was based around the idea that it could run blood tests, using proprietary technology that required only a finger pinprick and a small amount of blood. Holmes said the tests would be able to detect medical conditions like cancer and high cholesterol.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Holmes started raising money for Theranos from prominent investors like Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, the father of a childhood friend and the founder of prominent VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Theranos raised more than $700 million, and Draper has continued to defend Holmes.
Source: SEC, Crunchbase
Holmes took investors’ money on the condition that she wouldn’t have to reveal how Theranos’ technology worked. Plus, she would have the final say over everything having to do with the company.
Source: Vanity Fair
That obsession with secrecy extended to every aspect of Theranos. For the first decade Holmes spent building her company, Theranos operated in stealth mode. She even took three former Theranos employees to court, claiming they had misused Theranos trade secrets.
Source: San Francisco Business Times
Holmes’ attitude toward secrecy and running a company was borrowed from a Silicon Valley hero of hers: former Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Holmes started dressing in black turtlenecks like Jobs, decorated her office with his favorite furniture, and like Jobs, never took vacations.
Source: Vanity Fair
Even Holmes’s uncharacteristically deep voice may have been part of a carefully crafted image intended to help her fit in in the male-dominated business world. In ABC’s podcast on Holmes called “The Dropout,” former Theranos employees said the CEO sometimes “fell out of character,” particularly after drinking, and would speak in a higher voice.
Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, The Cut
Holmes was a demanding boss and wanted her employees to work as hard as she did. She had her assistants track when employees arrived and left each day. To encourage people to work longer hours, she started having dinner catered to the office around 8 p.m. each night.
Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
More behind-the-scenes footage of what life was like at Theranos was revealed in leaked videos obtained by the team behind the HBO documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.” The more than 100 hours of footage showed Holmes walking around the office, scenes from company parties, speeches from Holmes and Balwani, and Holmes dancing to “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer.
Source: Business Insider
Shortly after Holmes dropped out of Stanford at age 19, she began dating Theranos president and COO Sunny Balwani, who was 20 years her senior. The two met during Holmes’ third year in Stanford’s summer Mandarin program, the summer before she went to college. She was bullied by some of the other students, and Balwani had come to her aid.
Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
Balwani became Holmes’ No. 2 at Theranos despite having little experience. He was said to be a bully and often tracked his employees’ whereabouts. Holmes and Balwani eventually broke up in spring 2016 when Holmes pushed him out of the company.
Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
In 2008, the Theranos board decided to remove Holmes as CEO in favor of someone more experienced. But over the course of a two-hour meeting, Holmes convinced them to let her stay in charge of her company.
Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
As Theranos started to rake in millions of funding, Holmes became the subject of media attention and acclaim in the tech world. She graced the covers of Fortune and Forbes, gave a TED Talk, and spoke on panels with Bill Clinton and Alibaba’s Jack Ma.
Source: Vanity Fair
Theranos quickly began securing outside partnerships. Capital Blue Cross and Cleveland Clinic signed on to offer Theranos tests to their patients, and Walgreens made a deal to open Theranos testing centers in their stores. Theranos also formed a secret partnership with Safeway worth $350 million.
Source: Wired, Business Insider
In 2011, Holmes hired her younger brother, Christian, to work at Theranos, although he didn’t have a medical or science background. Christian Holmes spent his early days at Theranos reading about sports online and recruiting his Duke University fraternity brothers to join the company. People dubbed Holmes and his crew the “Frat Pack” and “Therabros.”
Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
At one point, Holmes was the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire with a net worth of around $4.5 billion.
Source: Forbes
Holmes was obsessed with security at Theranos. She asked anyone who visited the company’s headquarters to sign non-disclosure agreements before being allowed in the building and had security guards escort visitors everywhere — even to the bathroom.
Holmes hired bodyguards to drive her around in a black Audi sedan. Her nickname was “Eagle One.” The windows in her office had bulletproof glass.
Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
Around the same time, questions were being raised about Theranos’ technology. Ian Gibbons — chief scientist at Theranos and one of the company’s first hires — warned Holmes that the tests weren’t ready for the public to take and that there were inaccuracies in the technology. Outside scientists began voicing their concerns about Theranos, too.
Source: Vanity Fair, Business Insider
By August 2015, the FDA began investigating Theranos, and regulators from the government body that oversees laboratories found “major inaccuracies” in the testing Theranos was doing on patients.
Source: Vanity Fair
By October 2015, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published his investigation into Theranos’s struggles with its technology. Carreyrou’s reporting sparked the beginning of the company’s downward spiral.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Carreyrou found that Theranos’ blood-testing machine, named Edison, couldn’t give accurate results, so Theranos was running its samples through the same machines used by traditional blood-testing companies.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Holmes appeared on CNBC’s “Mad Money” shortly after the WSJ published its story to defend herself and Theranos. “This is what happens when you work to change things, and first they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world,” Holmes said.
Source: CNBC
By 2016, the FDA, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and SEC were all looking into Theranos.
In July 2016, Holmes was banned from the lab-testing industry for two years. By October, Theranos had shut down its lab operations and wellness centers.
Source: Business Insider
In March 2018, Theranos, Holmes, and Balwani were charged with “massive fraud” by the SEC. Holmes agreed to give up financial and voting control of the company, pay a $500,000 fine, and return 18.9 million shares of Theranos stock. She also isn’t allowed to be the director or officer of a publicly traded company for 10 years.
Source: Business Insider
Despite the charges, Holmes was allowed to stay on as CEO of Theranos, since it’s a private company. The company had been hanging on by a thread, and Holmes wrote to investors asking for more money to save Theranos. “In light of where we are, this is no easy ask,” Holmes wrote.
Source: Business Insider
In Theranos’ final days, Holmes reportedly got a Siberian husky puppy named Balto that she brought into the office. However, the dog wasn’t potty trained, and would go to the bathroom inside the company’s office and during meetings.
Source: Vanity Fair
In June 2018, Theranos announced that Holmes was stepping down as CEO. On the same day, the Department of Justice announced that a federal grand jury had charged Holmes, along with Balwani, with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Source: Business Insider, CNBC
Theranos sent an email to shareholders in September 2018 announcing that the company was shutting down. Theranos reportedly said it planned to spend the next few months repaying creditors with its remaining resources.
Source: Wall Street Journal