$4.5 billion lawsuit: Who is Elizabeth Holmes and how did she become America’s richest woman but become the best swindler of the year?

It seems that “Tinder scammer” and Anna Delvey have a serious rival. For several weeks now, the internet has been discussing the case of Elizabeth Holmes, who was sentenced to 135 months in prison and $121 million in damages in November this year. The fraudster’s case began four years ago when he and his colleagues were accused of defrauding investors and customers, but the case was delayed – “thanks” COVID-19. And then it was postponed from July 2021 to August of the same year – this time because of the accused’s pregnancy, which she kept a secret. As a result, the trial was given only a year before it began, and Elizabeth Holmes’ tenure will begin on April 27, 2023. Who is she, how did she become the richest woman in America, and then she lost everything and was convicted?

Elizabeth Holmes was born in Washington, DC, the son of a congressional committee worker and vice president of energy company Enron. At the age of nine, the family moved to Houston, then lived in China, and in 2002 entered Stanford University in chemistry (later Elizabeth Holmes said that since childhood she dreamed of treating people, but could not stand the sight of blood needles). However, the prospective swindler never got a diploma – he dropped out of school a year later and, without his family’s permission, used the money they had saved for education as the start-up capital of the Theranos company he founded (from the words “treatment” and “diagnosis”).

Elizabeth Holmes was only 19 when Theranos was founded, but her young age hasn’t stopped her from raising over $700 million in venture capital and private equity. How? It announced a breakthrough in the field of blood testing – its technology allegedly allows only a few drops of a patient’s blood to be used, unlike standard samples. As a result, the market value of Theranos was estimated at $10 billion a drink in 2013 and 2014, and the media wrote about a “medical revolution.”

But the company’s problems began almost simultaneously with its success: For example, in 2013 the company’s senior biochemist committed suicide after eight years of work, telling his wife that Theranos had failed, and in 2015 the technology was exposed. Doubt in the press. The Washington Post wrote in 2012 that the Department of Defense identified problems in the analysis, but General James Mattis intervened at the request of Elizabeth Holmes. A year later, he will be a member of the board of directors and cases will not be directed. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Holmes lived her best life: in 2015, Forbes recognized her as America’s richest woman with a fortune of $4.5 billion.

True, Theranos’ true collapse was not far off, and in the same 2015 medical research professors John Ioannidis and Eleftherios Diamandis and reporter John Carreira of The Wall Street Journal questioned the authenticity of Theranos technology. Elizabeth Holmes and her company were called to account by medical institutions, investors, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, lawyers, partners, patients – the list was long, and Entrepreneur magazine took first place in the ranking of the main protagonist of the event. The worst entrepreneurs admitted after ten years of development that their inventions didn’t work and that their research flaws needed to be addressed sooner.

A year later, the capital of Elizabeth Holmes dropped from 4.5 billion to almost zero – she was on the verge of bankruptcy, and the US Attorney’s Office launched an investigation into Theranos. A $100 million loan from Fortress Investment Group in 2017 almost saved the company from total ruin, but in vain – it ceased to exist in the fall of the following year.

Then, in 2018, Elizabeth Holmes and former Theranos head Ramesh Balwani were charged with “major fraud” – the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused them of extorting $700 million from investors under the pretext of taking an allegedly revolutionary blood test. technology. The once richest woman in America responded by agreeing to pay a $500,000 fine, return her remaining 18.9 million shares, and forfeit her right to hold a management position in any public company for ten years. However, neither she nor Theranos denied or denied the allegations.

Now Elizabeth Holmes is not giving interviews, and yet her succinct lawyer, David Boys, speaks to the press instead. But that story has already been filmed, and in the spring of 2022 Hulu released The Dropout series starring Amanda Seyfried. He would later receive six Emmy nominations.