Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth Anne Holmes was born on February 3, 1984, in Washington, D.C. Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was a vice president at a subsidiary of Enron called Clean Energy Solutions Group. Her mother, Noel Anne (née Daoust), worked as a Congressional committee staffer. Christian later held executive positions in government agencies such as USAID, the EPA, and USTDA. Holmes is partly of Danish ancestry. One of her paternal great-great-great-grandfathers was Charles Louis Fleischmann, a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant to the United States who founded Fleischmann's Yeast. The Holmes family "was very proud of its yeast empire" history, according to family friend Joseph Fuisz: "I think the parents very much yearned for the days of yore when the family was one of the richest in America. And I think Elizabeth channeled that, and at a young age."

Holmes graduated from high school at 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. She was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta at Stanford.

After the end of her freshman year, Holmes worked in a laboratory at the Genome Institute of Singapore and tested for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) through the collection of blood samples with syringes. She filed her first patent application on a wearable drug-delivery patch in 2003. Holmes reported that she was raped at Stanford in 2003. In March 2004, she dropped out of Stanford's School of Engineering and used her tuition money as seed funding for a consumer healthcare technology company.

Holmes was romantically involved with the Pakistani-born technology entrepreneur Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, who immigrated to India and then the US. She met him in 2002 during a trip to Beijing as part of Stanford University's Mandarin program. Holmes was 18 at the time and had just graduated from high school. Balwani is 19 years older than Holmes and he was married to another woman at the time.

Balwani divorced his wife in 2002, and became romantically involved with Holmes in 2003, about the same time Holmes dropped out of university. The couple moved into an apartment together in 2005. Although Balwani did not officially join Theranos until 2009, when he was given the title of COO, he was advising Holmes behind the scenes from the company's inception. Balwani left Theranos in 2016 in the wake of investigations. The circumstances of his departure are unclear; Holmes has stated that she fired him, but Balwani says that he left of his own accord.

On November 29, 2021, Holmes testified that she had been raped while she was a student at Stanford and that she sought solace from Balwani in the aftermath of the incident. She also said Balwani was very controlling during their romantic relationship, which lasted more than a decade, and at times he berated and sexually abused her. In her testimony, she stated he also wanted to "kill the person" she was and create a "new Elizabeth". However, she also testified that Balwani had not forced her to make the false statements to investors, business partners, journalists and company directors that had been described in the case. In court filings, Balwani has "categorically" denied abuse allegations, calling them "false and inflammatory."

Before the March 2018 settlement, Holmes owned half of Theranos's stock. Forbes listed her as one of U.S. Richest Self-Made Women in 2015 with a net worth of $4.5 billion. In June 2016, Forbes released an updated valuation of $800 million for Theranos, which made Holmes's stake essentially worthless, because other investors owned preferred shares and would have been paid before Holmes, who owned only common stock. Holmes reportedly owed a $25 million debt to Theranos in connection with exercising stock options. She did not receive any company cash from the arrangement, nor did she sell any of her shares, including those associated with the debt.

In early 2017, Holmes met William "Billy" Evans, a 25-year-old heir to Evans Hotels, a family-owned group of hotels in the San Diego area. In 2018, they became engaged. On June 14, 2019, Vanity Fair reported that Holmes and Evans had married in a private ceremony. However, Holmes stated in 2025 that they had not married yet. Holmes gave birth to a son in July 2021. In October 2022, weeks before her sentencing hearing, it was reported she might have been pregnant with a second child. Holmes was accused of conceiving a second child, according to a court filing from February 2023, as a strategy for delaying the start of her prison term. Holmes denied this, saying she wanted to grow her family and the child was conceived before she was indicted, which she did not anticipate. Prior to her incarceration, she lived in the Mortimer Fleishhacker House in Woodside, California, with Evans.

In January 2022, NPR obtained a copy of a partial police report from the evening of October 5, 2003, in which Holmes called the police and alleged she had been sexually assaulted at a fraternity house at Stanford between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. that morning. The police report supported claims made by Holmes during the trial, in which she said: "I was questioning how I was going to be able to process that [rape] experience and what I wanted to do with my life, and I decided that I was going to build a life by building [a company]." She started Theranos later that year. The report, written by the deputies who responded to the call, was withheld from release, and the partial information obtained by NPR does not identify an alleged perpetrator or other details about the incident; it does identify the street address of the Sigma Chi fraternity house as the location.

U.S. v. Holmes, et al.

In June 2018, after a two-year-long investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California, a federal grand jury indicted Holmes and Balwani on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Both pleaded not guilty. The prosecution alleged that Holmes and Balwani had engaged in two criminal schemes: one to defraud investors, and a second to defraud doctors and patients. After the indictment was issued, Holmes resigned as CEO of Theranos but remained chair of its board of directors.

Holmes was tried in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, with U.S. district judge Edward Davila presiding. She hired defense lawyers from Williams & Connolly, a prominent American law firm that specializes in white-collar crime defense. The trial began on August 31, 2021, after being delayed for more than a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Holmes's pregnancy. At trial, Holmes testified on her own behalf for seven days, claiming among other things that she was misled by her staff about the technology, and that Balwani held sway over her during the romantic relationship they had and which was still ongoing when the alleged criminal acts happened. The case's evidence outlined Holmes's role in faked demonstrations, falsified validation reports, misleading claims about contracts, and overstated financials at Theranos.

On January 3, 2022, the jury found Holmes guilty on four of the seven counts related to defrauding investors: three counts of wire fraud, and one of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She was found not guilty on four counts related to defrauding patients, and the jury returned a "no verdict" on the three other counts of wire fraud against investors. The judge declared a mistrial on the last three counts, and the prosecution later agreed to dismiss them. Holmes awaited sentencing while remaining free on $500,000 bail, secured with property.