With her startup Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes wants to revolutionize blood tests, but then the technology turns out to be a bluff worth billions. The former Silicon Valley star was found guilty of this earlier this year. Now a jury decides how long the mother of a young son has to stay in prison.
The former US blood test entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes – once a celebrated young star in the biotech industry – has been sentenced to around eleven years in prison for fraud. A federal judge in the city of San Jose, California, announced the sentence against the founder of the start-up company Theranos. The 38-year-old does not have to start her prison sentence before April 27 next year. The reason: the mother of a one-year-old son pregnant again, it had already been speculated in advance whether this could affect the sentence and the time of imprisonment.
Holmes was found guilty on four counts of investor fraud by a jury in January. The public prosecutor had subsequently demanded 15 years in prison against her. The defense had argued that Holmes should be spared or sentenced to no more than a year and a half in prison. Federal Judge Edward Davila now handed down a sentence of 135 months, or 11 years and three months, in prison.
Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 when he was just 19 years old. The company advertised a supposedly revolutionary technology for particularly fast, effective and inexpensive blood tests. The charismatic young entrepreneur was celebrated as a tech pioneer and won financially strong investors and prominent supporters such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Holmes herself became a billionaire. Then Wall Street Journal reports revealed that the technology didn’t work at all. According to the prosecutor, the company had secretly used conventional Siemens laboratory equipment for testing in order to cover up the errors in its own machines.
Holmes has always denied defrauding investors. She admitted mistakes, but claimed to have believed in the potential of her technology. She also blamed her ex-boyfriend and former business partner Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani for the scandal. He was also found guilty of fraud in July. The sentence is still pending.