Holmes amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and a huge fortune for his company marketing pioneering blood testing technology. It was eventually revealed that it was a scam.
In the US, Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes has received a good 11-year prison sentence. Holmes was sentenced at the beginning of the year for four crimes related to fraud.
Holmes has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and his attorney has indicated that Holmes plans to appeal his conviction. Holmes is currently expecting a child, and according to the judge, she does not have to report to the authorities until next April.
Holmes raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and a huge fortune for his pioneering blood testing technology company Theranos. It was eventually revealed that it was a scam.
The sentence had been postponed several times. Last week, a federal judge denied Holmes’ request for a new trial. Prosecutors had demanded a 15-year prison sentence for Holmes. His final sentence was 135 months, or 11 years and three months.
“Blinded by ambition” Silicon Valley’s startup queen
As recently as 2014, Holmes was hailed as Silicon Valley’s startup queen and was compared to Apple’s founder, the late To Steve Jobs. In the same year, Forbes magazine named her the world’s youngest female billionaire whose fortune was not inherited but self-made. The magazine estimated that his net worth was 4.5 billion dollars at the time.
Theranos markets testing technology that would identify, for example, cancer or diabetes from a few drops of blood taken from the fingertip of a patient.
The test device named Edison did not actually work as it was supposed to. It also turned out that Theranos had done a large part of its tests with devices developed by other companies.
– I stand before you to take responsibility for Theranos. I loved Theranos. It was my life’s work, a tearful Holmes said in court moments before the verdict was read.
He said that for the past few years, every day, he experienced deep pain at what people had to go through because he had disappointed them. Federal prosecutor Stephanie Hinds instead opined in a court filing that Holmes was blinded by ambition.
The prosecutors demanded that Holmes pay 800 million in damages
Books and a TV series have been written about Holmes’s rocket-like rise to the top of Silicon Valley and the rapid collapse that followed.
At one point, the Theranos board included, among others, the former US Secretary of Defense James Mattis as well as the country’s former foreign ministers Henry Kissinger and now deceased George Schultz.
Holmes’ sentence was read Friday by the same judge who oversaw his lengthy trial in San Jose. Holmes’ lawyers had asked the court for leniency. They had painted a picture of Holmes as a loyal friend and reminded her that she was the mother of a young child with another child on the way.
Two hundred letters of support for Holmes were also filed with the court. Letters came from, among others, his family, friends and at least one US senator.
At trial, prosecutors described Holmes as an ambitious con man who treated his employees unfairly.
Prosecutors want Holmes to pay $800 million in damages to investors. A separate hearing is being held on damages, although Holmes himself has said that he does not have the money to pay compensation
Read more:
The rise and fall of a business star – According to the prosecutor, Elizabeth Holmes tricked investors into supporting an invention that did not exist
Elizabeth Holmes amassed a billion fortune with an invention that didn’t work – now she got a sentence and could face tens of years in prison