Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of the collapsed Silicon Valley blood testing company, Theranos, has been sentenced to 11.25 years in prison plus three years supervised release for financial crimes she committed while running the once-high flying venture.
Holmes was also fined a $400 million special assessment. Holmes must surrender to custody on April 27, 2023. Holmes is expected to appeal.
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Before Holmes' sentence was read, she addressed the courtroom to express remorse.
"I stand before you taking responsibility for Theranos. I loved Theranos. It was my life’s work. My team meant the world to me. They wanted to make a difference in the world. I am devastated by my failings," she said.
"Every day for the past years, I have felt deep pain for the people…those people who believe in us and those patients. I worked so hard to serve. I gave everything I had to try to to build...Theranos. Looking back, there are so many things I would do differently. I tried to realize my dream too quickly."
Founded a company pretending to have developed some sort of awesome blood test, doable by the patients themselves, with a micro-amount of blood, capable of showing a wide range of issues. The tech never worked. She reaped tons of VC money, but eventually the tech was put into question and it all came falling down.
She's also quite a character - she used a different fake voice when pitching to prospective investors, for example.
I've never come up with a joke that I really liked about the hows and whys of her voice. This Youtube comment nails it completely for me...
I worked in biotech on a working version of what she tried to make about 9 years ago except no microfluidics, just standard pipetting of ml volume liquid. It was all possible. I think the real issue is that most medical tests with small samples have higher error than the industry is willing to admit. IMO, she didn't defraud investors, everything seemed like standard industry lies. This seems more like corruption of powerful people that are able to claw back their money on a losing bet.
From what I read, the whole crux was that you'd be able to take 1 drop of blood and do many tests on it, but they had almost no tests that actually worked on 1 drop, and they claimed they did. They also ran tests in traditional machines to cover up that they didn't have anything working yet. They consistently lied about the state of their capabilities.
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