Table of Biography
Elizabeth Holmes is a former entrepreneur and businesswoman from the United States. Elizabeth Holmes was the founder and chief executive (CEO) of a now-defunct health technology company “Theranos.”
Early Life
Elizabeth Holmes was born on the 3rd of February 1984, in Washington, D.C., the United States of America. Her birth name is Elizabeth Anne Holmes and is an American by nationality.
In addition, she has a birth sign of Aquarius and has her belief in Christianity. Moreover, Elizabeth belongs to the Caucasian ethnicity and she is 39 years old.
This former businesswoman is the daughter of Christian Rasmus Holmes IV (father) and Noel Anne Daoust (mother). His father was the vice president at an energy company, Enron, which went bankrupt later on after an accounting fraud scandal.
Moreover, her father held numerous executive positions in government agencies like USAID, the EPA, and USTDA. While her mother is a Congressional committee staffer. She grew up with her brother’s name Christian Holmes V who is a vice president at Enron by profession.
Education and Early Career
Talking about her academic career, she went to the St. John’s School in Houston. Later, she enrolled to study at Stanford with Chemical Engineering as her subject. Moreover, she has also learned Mandarin Chinese via home tutoring sessions arranged by her parents.
She enrolled at Stanford University in the United States summer Mandarin program. In addition, she studied chemical engineering. Also worked as a student researcher and laboratory assistant at the School of Engineering.
At the end of her freshman year, she worked in the laboratory at the Genome Institute of Singapore. Similarly, she suffers from a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) through the collection of blood samples with syringes.
In 2003, Elizabeth Holmes filed her first patent application for a wearable drug-delivery patch. Later, in the year 2004, she dropped out of the Stanford School of Engineering. Moreover, she used her tuition money as seed funding for a consumer healthcare technology company in the year 2004.
Professional Career
In the year 2003, Elizabeth Holmes established the company “Real-Time Curs” in Palo Alto, California. Following several years, she shifted her focus to creating a new form of blood testing, claiming it was based on her terror of needles.
It was renamed “Theranos” in 2003, which is an amalgamation of the words “therapy” and “diagnosis.”Channing Robertson became the company’s first board member.
Till December 2004, she raised $6 million to fund the company and was also able to collect over $92 million in venture capital by the end of 2010.
Theranos
Additionally, Holmes operated Theranos in “stealth mode,” without press releases or a company website until September 2013. The company said a partnership with Walgreens to launch in-store blood sample collection centers.
By the end of 2014, this businesswoman’s name appeared on 18 U.S. patents and 66 foreign patents. In the year 2015, she agreed with Cleveland Clinic, Capital BlueCross, and AmeriHealth Caritas to use Theranos technology.
Downfall
John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal gets a tip from a medical expert who thinks the Edison blood-testing device seemed suspicious. Carreyrou starts up a secret, months-long investigation into Theranos.
Moreover, Holmes used legal and financial threats against Carreyrou, the Journal, and the whistleblowers to prevent him from publishing. However, Carreyrou published a book named “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup” in the year 2018.
The book is a detail about the investigation of Theranos. However, Holmes denied all allegations and claims. In the year July 2016, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) officially banned Holmes from owning, operating, or directing blood-testing services.
The next year, The State of Arizona filed suit against Theranos alleging that the company had sold 1.5 million blood tests to Arizonas while concealing or misrepresenting important facts about those tests.
As a result, Theranos settled the lawsuit by agreeing to refund the cost of the tests to consumers and to pay $225,000 in civil fines and attorney fees, for a total of $4.65 million.
In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Theranos and Holmes with “massive fraud” by making false or exaggerated claims about the accuracy of the company’s blood-testing technology.
Charges and Jailed
Moreover, Holmes made a settlement after paying the charges of a $500,000 fine returned 18.9 million shares to the company, and relinquished her voting control of Theranos. She was also barred for ten years from serving as an officer or director of a public company.
In 2018, a federal grand jury indicted Holmes and former Theranos COO Ramesh Balwani on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for distributing falsified blood tests to consumers.
This same day, Holmes dropped down as CEO, and Later that year Theranos ceased operations.
Caption: Elizabeth Holmes hearing in the court (Source:
CNBC)
Elizabeth Holmes – Net Worth 2024
In 2014, Frobes listed Elizabeth Holmes as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. And, she was also ranked number 110 on the Forbes 400 list. During that time, her company Theranos was valued at $9 billion and had raised more than $400 million in venture capital.
Moreover, she was also named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year and listed on its 40 Under 40. In the year 2015, she was listed as one of America’s Richest Self-Made Women by Forbes.
During that time, her net worth was around $4.5 billion. Due to the revelations of potential fraud about Theranos, Forbes estimated her net worth to zero and named her one of the “World’s Most Disappointing Leaders”.
Relationship Status
Caption: Elizabeth Holmes with her husband (Source: People.com)
Body Measurements
Caption: Elizabeth Holmes posing for a photo (Source: Us Weekly)
Elizabeth Holmes – Social Media
The former businesswoman is currently in jail and is officially not active on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at the moment.