Elizabeth Holmes was found to have lied to investors while she was CEO of the blood testing company Theranos. This happened in January 2022. A recent court document says that after Holmes was found guilty, she bought a one-way ticket to Mexico to “leave the country.”
Elizabeth Holmes got 11 years in prison in November 2021, but she is now fighting her conviction. CNN reports that prosecutors say she should start her sentence right away. They say she is a flight risk because she doesn’t know where she’s going, and she lives on an estate that costs $13,000 a month to run.
The court document showed that Holmes had booked a one-way flight to Mexico for January 26, 2022, but no return flight. Holmes’s plans to leave were canceled after the government talked to her lawyers, who said that the travel reservation was made before the verdict and that she only wanted to go to a friend’s wedding in Mexico.
At its peak, Theranos was worth $9 billion. It got big retail partners by saying that its technology could test for many conditions with just a small amount of blood.
But everything fell apart when a Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015 found that the technology had not been tested and wasn’t reliable. This caused the company to fail and the CEO to go to jail.
Holmes’ time in prison will begin on April 27, 2023.
Elizabeth Holmes living in a luxurious $13,000 apartment
Court documents say that the founder of Theranos, who was given a sentence of 11.25 years in prison for crimes like wire fraud, is still doing well. On Thursday, in a court filing, prosecutors said that Elizabeth Holmes is still living the high life, as reported by Insider.
Prosecutors wrote that Theranos’s founder, sentenced to 11.25 years in prison in November, lives on a $13,000-a-month-to-keep-up estate. The papers Holmes gave to the probation office were used.
Bloomberg says that this filing was a response to Holmes’s lawyers’ attempts to keep her out of jail while she appeals her case. But the prosecutors said she should still go to prison in April when she is scheduled to.
“In this country, there is only one criminal justice system. There isn’t one for the wealthy and another for the poor, “they put in the paperwork.
They also said in the filing that Holmes “continues to show no remorse to her victims.” Holmes was tried for fraud in the Northern District Court of California.
Holmes started Theranos after she left Stanford University in 2003. She didn’t like needles, so she wanted to find a better way to draw blood and test it.
Later, she told investors that her Edison machine could run over 200 tests with just one drop of blood. This made them believe her; some gave her money, like Larry Ellison’s $700 million.
At its peak, the company was worth about $10 billion.
But in 2015, the FDA began to look into her company, and in the same year, the Wall Street Journal said that the company’s blood tests didn’t live up to its reputation.
By 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged both Holmes and COO Sunny Sunny Balwani with fraud. But Holmes’s trial didn’t start until September 2021, after the birth of her first child. Finally, in January 2022, she was found to be guilty.
On November 18, after more than three hours of testimony, Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 11.25 years in prison and 3 years of supervised release. However, she will eventually have to give up. According to a video from The Wall Street Journal, she was walking into court looking like she was going to have her second child.
From the courtroom, NBC’s Scott Budman tweeted that the amount Holmes would have to pay back to investors would be decided at a later time.
She got married to hotel heir William “Billy” Evans in 2019 while waiting for court. She looked like she was about to have her second child when she went to court.
CNBC said in September 2021 that Holmes and Evans were living in a smaller house on a 74-acre estate in California for sale for $135 million.
Bloomberg also said that prosecutors said Holmes told her probation officers she still wanted to work on patents for blood tests.
What Happened to Theranos?
After Theranos’ lab was shut down, Holmes tried to make a comeback with a new product called the “MiniLab.” She could get around the CMS’s penalties if she sold the device instead of using it in its labs.
Theranos fired 155 workers while it worked on the MiniLab and fought lawsuits from investors.
Then, in March 2018, Holmes and Balwani, who had quit the company in 2016, were charged with “massive fraud” by the SEC, according to Business Insider. Then, in June, they were charged with trying to do wire fraud together and nine counts of wire fraud.
Since Theranos was a private company, Holmes was able to keep her job as CEO, but she had to give up financial and voting control, pay a $500,000 fine, and return $18.9 million in Theranos stock. Holmes was charged with a crime the same day she stepped down as CEO of Theranos.
Read Also: Theranos: Sunny Balwani bags jail time
After 15 years, the company announced in September 2018 that it was closing.
