She travelled by private jet, graced the covers of Fortune, Forbes and Inc. Holmes enjoyed a meteoric rise from college dropout to Silicon Valley darling: a young, confident female entrepreneur celebrated for creating a truly exciting and innovative product with phenomenal potential to “change the world” as she was oft to claim.Īt its peak, Theranos was worth $9 billion dollars and Elizabeth herself an estimated $6 billion. To make matters worse, the machines in Walgreens stores were prone to reporting incorrect results, causing much emotional anguish for users. They had not received endorsement by Pfizer or GSK, nor had they ever been deployed for use in Afghanistan. In reality, the Edison devices could only run around eight tests, far from the hundreds advertised. There was just one problem though: *none* of Theranos’s claims were true. Theranos devices were even rolled out in 40 Walgreen stores – a US drugstore chain – for use by the general public in 2013, per Tatler. On its board of directors sat two ex-Secretary of States, Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, plus former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, William Foege. Huge names, including media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, ploughed over $1 billion into the company in investments. Official documents provided to potential investors featured Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline logos, suggesting the medical behemoths had lent its backing to its machines. Theranos made a number of impressive claims about its device, including that they had been asked to provide its finger prick tests to soldiers on the battlefield in Afghanistan. It was named the Edison device, after the inventor Thomas Edison. Medical device startup, Theranos, was a blood testing company that claimed to have the technology to run over 300 tests on one machine, using a single drop of blood. She dropped out during her sophomore (second) year, at 19-years-old, to concentrate on building Theranos full time. However, she soon learned from an early age that she was scared of needles – another reason she claims to have been inspired to create the blood testing company, Theranos, which hoped to use a smaller lance to obtain blood.Īfter graduating high school, Holmes elected to study chemical engineering at prestigious US college Stanford. It's said that Holmes was inspired by her great-great-grandfather, a surgeon, to go into the medical field, along with the untimely (and perhaps preventable) loss of her uncle to skin cancer. According to Business Insider, at the age of nine, she told relatives with the "utmost seriousness and determination" that she wanted to be a billionaire when she grew up – a goal that, for a short time, she achieved.Įxtremely intelligent, Holmes was a straight A student – taking Mandarin lessons and even starting her own business selling computer software to China during her time at high school. Who is Elizabeth Holmes?Įlizabeth Holmes was born on 3 February 1984 in Washington, D.C, to middle class parents. Now, there are two new projects about the debacle in the works too – in addition to the existing HBO docuseries The Inventor and aforementioned podcast, The Dropout.Ī biopic about Holmes’ life has been confirmed, directed by Don't Look Up's Adam McKay and starring Jennifer Lawrence, as well as a Hulu TV spinoff of The Dropout, featuring Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth, slated for release on 3 March 2022.īut, for the uninitiated, who actually is Elizabeth Holmes, what happened at Theranos and where is Elizabeth now? Here’s everything you NTK about this crazy case. The fallout from the Theranos scandal has captured the world’s attention since news of the epic misconduct was exposed. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. If you’ve been as obsessed with The Dropout podcast as us, you’ll know that Elizabeth Holmes, disgraced former CEO of Theranos (a blood testing start-up based in Silicon Valley), was this month convicted on four out of 11 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy.
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