Elizabeth Holmes Family and Parents – Elizabeth Anne Holmes is a former American businesswoman who was the founder and chief executive of Theranos, a now-defunct health technology company.
| Bio | |
|---|---|
| Name | Elizabeth Holmes |
| Birthdate ( Age) | 3 February 1984 |
| Place of Birth | Washington, D.C., United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Marital Status | In Relationship |
| Spouse/Partner | Billy Evans ( m. 2019) |
| Children | Not Known |
| Parents | Christian Holmes IV, Noel Holmes |
| Education | Stanford University |
| Profession | American businesswoman |
| Net Worth | $9 billion. |
| Last Update | May 2022 |
Elizabeth Anne Holmes is a former American businesswoman who was the founder and chief executive of Theranos, a now-defunct health technology company. Theranos soared in valuation after the company claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing testing methods that could use surprisingly small volumes of blood, such as from a fingerprick.
By 2015, Forbes had named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America on the basis of a $9-billion valuation of her company.The next year, following revelations of potential fraud about Theranos’s claims, Forbes had revised its published estimate of Holmes’s net worth to zero,and Fortune had named her one of the “World’s Most Disappointing Leaders”.
Elizabeth Holmes Family and Parents
Elizabeth Holmes was born February 3, 1984, in Washington, D.C.Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was a vice president at Enron, an energy company that later went bankrupt after an accounting fraud scandal. Later he held executive positions in government agencies such as USAID, the EPA, and USTDA.Her mother, Noel Anne (Daoust), worked as a Congressional committee staffer.
Holmes attended St. John’s School in Houston.During high school, she was interested in computer programming and says she started her first business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities.Her parents had arranged Mandarin Chinese home tutoring, and partway through high school, Holmes began attending Stanford University’s summer Mandarin program.In 2002, Holmes attended Stanford, where she studied chemical engineering and worked as a student researcher and laboratory assistant in the School of Engineering.
Elizabeth Holmes Husband
Holmes was romantically involved with technology entrepreneur Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, a Pakistani-born Hindu who immigrated to India and then the US.She met him in 2002 at age 18, while still in school; he was 19 years older than she was and was married to another woman at the time.
In early 2019, Holmes became engaged to William “Billy” Evans, a 27-year-old heir to the Evans Hotel Group.In mid-2019, Holmes and Evans married in a private ceremony.The couple lives in San Francisco.Holmes gave birth to a boy in July 2021.
Elizabeth Holmes Net Worth
Elizabeth Anne Holmes is a former American businesswoman who was the founder and chief executive of Theranos, a now-defunct health technology company who has an estimated Net Worth of between $9 billion in 2021.
Professional Career
Holmes founded the company Real-Time Cures in Palo Alto, California, to “democratize healthcare”.Holmes described her fear of needles as a motivation and sought to perform blood tests using only small amounts of blood.When Holmes initially pitched the idea to reap “vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived from the tip of a finger” to her medicine professor Phyllis Gardner at Stanford, Gardner responded, “I don’t think your idea is going to work”, explaining it was impossible to do what Holmes was claiming could be done.
Several other expert medical professors told Holmes the same thing.However, Holmes did not relent, and she succeeded in getting her advisor and dean at the School of Engineering, Channing Robertson, to back her idea.
By December 2004, Holmes had raised $6 million to fund the firm.By the end of 2010, Theranos had more than $92 million in venture capital.In July 2011, Holmes was introduced to former secretary of state George Shultz. After a two-hour meeting, he joined the Theranos board of directors.Holmes was recognized for forming “the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history” over the next three years.
In October 2015, despite Boies’s legal threats and strong-arm tactics, Carreyrou published a “bombshell article”detailing how the Edison device gave inaccurate results, and revealing that the company had been using commercially available machines made by other manufacturers for most of its testing.Carreyrou continued to expose Holmes in a series of articles and, in 2018, published a book titled Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, detailing his investigation of Theranos.
In March 2018 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Holmes and Theranos’s former president, Ramesh Balwani, with fraud by taking more than $700 million from investors while advertising a false product. On March 14, 2018, Holmes settled an SEC lawsuit.The charges of fraud included the company’s false claim that its technology was being used by the U.S. Department of Defense in combat situations.The company also lied when it claimed to have a $100 million revenue stream in 2014. That year, the company only made $100,000.The terms of Holmes’s settlement included surrendering voting control of Theranos, a ban on holding an officer position in a public company for 10 years, and a $500,000 fine.
At its height in 2015, Theranos had more than 800 employees. It fired 340 staff members in October 2016 and an additional 155 employees in January 2017.In April 2018, Theranos filed a WARN Act notice with the State of California, announcing its plans to permanently lay off 105 employees, leaving it with fewer than two dozen employees.Most of the remaining employees were laid off in August 2018. On September 5, 2018, the company announced that it had begun the process of formally dissolving, with its remaining cash and assets to be distributed to its creditors.
Criminal charges
On June 15, 2018, following an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California in San Francisco that lasted more than two years, a federal grand jury indicted Holmes and former Theranos chief operating officer and president, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Both pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors allege that Holmes and Balwani engaged in two criminal schemes, one to defraud investors, the other to defraud doctors and patients.After the indictment was issued, Holmes stepped down as CEO of Theranos but remained chair of the board.
In June 2019, Bloomberg News reported Holmes and Balwani were looking into a possible defense strategy of blaming the media for the downfall of Theranos and whether journalist John Carreyrou’s reporting caused undue influence upon government regulatory agencies in order to write a sensational story for The Wall Street Journal.Later unsealed documents indicated Holmes plans to blame Balwani, who “dominated” her to such an extent she was unable to make her own decisions.
In late August 2020, Holmes’s legal team filed new motions seeking the dismissal of seven of the 12 felony fraud charges, claiming that Judge Edward Davila had made a mistake about her obligations to the Theranos investors.In September 2020, Bloomberg News reported that Holmes is exploring a “mental disease” defense for her criminal fraud trial when the judge overseeing the case ruled that government prosecutors can examine Holmes.
In February 2021, federal government prosecutors accused Holmes and other executives of destroying evidence in Theranos’s final days in business. The attorney for Holmes argued the government was to blame for their failure to preserve critical evidence. The specific evidence in question concerned the company’s history of internal testing, including the accuracy and failure rates of Theranos’s blood-testing systems.
