Elizabeth Holmes, the former Silicon Valley star sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for fraud at the head of her start-up Theranos, began her sentence Tuesday in a Texas prison. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) confirmed to AFP that the former businessman arrived at the federal prison in Bryan, Texas, according to journalists.
In January 2022, after a four-month trial, Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of deception in raising funds for Theranos, which she claimed could revolutionize the world of medical diagnostics. She tried several legal appeals to avoid jail time pending a possible appeal trial, hoping to get her conviction overturned, but they were turned down.
At 39, twenty years after founding the start-up, she is therefore behind bars in an establishment for women, equipped with a “minimal” security device. According to the BOP website, these types of prisons have dormitories, a small number of guards, and rehabilitation programs.
Technologies that never worked
Theranos promised faster and cheaper diagnoses than those of traditional laboratories, thanks to methods presented as revolutionary, which allowed multiple tests to be carried out with a very small amount of blood. But the technology never worked as promised and the company closed in 2018, leaving behind investors who had pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the company’s capital.
Elizabeth Holmes has always asserted her bona fides, denying that she deliberately sought to mislead investors. In mid-May, Judge Edward Davila ordered him and former Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani to jointly and severally return $452 million to investors. Among them is businessman and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who is owed $125 million by the two former partners.
Youngest Billionaire Woman
In an interview in New York TimesPosted in early May, Elizabeth Holmes explained that even before the damages, she was unable to pay her attorneys’ fees, which the prosecution estimated at more than $30 million.
The press reported that in 2019 she married Billy Evans, whose family owns a hotel chain. She has two young children.
His story fascinated the American media, because before his downfall, he embodied a certain image of a Silicon Valley innovator. In 2014, Forbes valued Elizabeth Holmes’s fortune at $4.5 billion, describing her as the youngest female billionaire not to inherit her fortune.
Source: BFM TV
