The woman now coined “The Dropout,” thanks to a Hulu series of the same name, Elizabeth Holmes walked into her new home yesterday. As the former CEO of tech startup Theranos, Holmes started her eleven-year prison sentence officially as she entered the Texas prison camp assigned to her.
For approximately eleven years, Holmes will call Texas Federal Prison Camp Bryan home.
Holmes is a Texas-born native, having been born and raised in Houston. As a young girl in Houston, she would aspire to be another Steve Jobs, which led to her formation of Theranos. The company was a tech startup in Silicon Valley that Holmes founded after she dropped out of Stanford University when she was nineteen years old.
The company sold a concept of a product still in the works that they advertised as something that would change healthcare forever. Theranos’ product was supposedly a piece of tech that could nearly instantly conduct tests for countless diseases and ailments from just a few drops of blood. The product garnered investments and even sold before any actual, physical product existed. Holmes and her romantic and business partner at the time, Sunny Balwani, were exposed for selling fictitious tech when an exposé was published by The Wall Street Journal, thus beginning their criminal investigation.
In 2018, Holmes and Balwani were first charged with their crimes by the U.S. Justice Department. At that point, Holmes’ value sat around $4.5 billion. Sitting on the board of Theranos were also several former cabinet members for different U.S. Presidents.
When the criminal charges came to Holmes, it was also an attempt to attack the increase in “fake it until you make it” tech coming out of Silicon Valley.
The “fake it until you make it” tech was the type of tech that Theranos was, tech that is being marketed but yet still in development. Around the same time as Theranos was taking off, other Silicon Valley-based companies were starting to implement this mentally and beginning marketing a product before it was anywhere near ready.
After a long and complicated trial, Holmes faced convictions on four felony charges of fraud and conspiracy. She attempted to appeal her conviction and remain in her California home in the meantime, but her bail has run up. As of May 30th, Holmes is officially an inmate of a Texas-based prison camp. The prison camp is low security and has a large inmate working program. It is unknown at this time whether or not Holmes will participate in the program.
