BRYAN: Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is in custody at a Texas prison where she could spend the next 11 years for overseeing a blood-testing hoax that became a parable about greed and hubris in Silicon Valley.
Holmes, 39, on Tuesday entered the minimum-security federal prison for women inmates in Bryan, Texas near Houston. She has been free on bail since January 2022 when a jury convicted her on four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy. Holmes became a star of Silicon Valley when she said her start-up was perfecting an easy-to-use test kit that could carry out a wide range of medical diagnostics with just a few drops of blood.
The hype surrounding that purported breakthrough helped Theranos raise nearly $1 billion from enthralled investors and turned Holmes into a tech celebrity with a fortune valued at $4.5 billion on paper in 2014.
But the fortune of the Stanford University dropout flamed out after an investigation into the validity of the tests. In addition to her prison sentence, she and former top Theranos executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani have been ordered to pay $452 million to the bilked investors.
Holmes, 39, on Tuesday entered the minimum-security federal prison for women inmates in Bryan, Texas near Houston. She has been free on bail since January 2022 when a jury convicted her on four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy. Holmes became a star of Silicon Valley when she said her start-up was perfecting an easy-to-use test kit that could carry out a wide range of medical diagnostics with just a few drops of blood.
The hype surrounding that purported breakthrough helped Theranos raise nearly $1 billion from enthralled investors and turned Holmes into a tech celebrity with a fortune valued at $4.5 billion on paper in 2014.
But the fortune of the Stanford University dropout flamed out after an investigation into the validity of the tests. In addition to her prison sentence, she and former top Theranos executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani have been ordered to pay $452 million to the bilked investors.