Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO of biotech startup Theranos, is serving time after being found guilty of fraud.
Holmes was originally sentenced to over 11 years in May 2023 after being found guilty of four counts of wire fraud in January 2022. Months into her sentencing, a judge shortened her sentence by two years.
She first gained notoriety for becoming the youngest woman self-made billionaire. In 2003, she dropped out of Stanford and started Theranos, a Silicon Valley technology company with the goal of diagnosing medical conditions with a simple pinprick of blood. Her saga was depicted in the Hulu drama “The Dropout.”
After spending about two years in prison, Holmes gave her first interview in 2025, telling People that she maintains her innocence and being separated from her two kids “shatters my world.”
Here’s a recap of Holmes’ business history and legal battle through today.
2003: Holmes founds Theranos, a seemingly revolutionary blood-testing startup
Holmes, who was 19 at the time, used the money intended for her Stanford tuition to launch Theranos in 2003. The name is a portmanteau of “therapy” and “diagnosis.”
To seed Theranos, Holmes sold investors on an attractive idea: She would “democratize” medical blood testing with a machine called the Edison. The device, she pledged, could run over 200 blood tests using a pinprick’s worth of blood.
Holmes’s concept netted her ample press coverage and prestige. In 2015, Holmes was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people. Theranos garnered $900 million in investments from the likes of Walgreens, as well as Walmart and Cox Communications heirs. By 2014, Theranos was valued at $9 billion.
2015: Theranos goes under
In 2015, however, the biotech empire came crashing down.
Allegations from former Theranos employees and an expose published by The Wall Street Journal detailed how Theranos tampered with research and purposefully overlooked failed quality-control checks.
Whistleblowers — including former Theranos employee Tyler Shulz, the grandson of former Secretary of State and Theranos board member George Shultz — asserted that the company’s Edison machine was far from capable of doing what the world believed it could.
2021: Elizabeth Holmes has a son with her partner, Billy Evans
During the trial, Holmes frequently was photographed walking hand-in-hand with her partner, Billy Evans.
Holmes was first seen with Evans at Burning Man festival in 2018, per the New York Times. Evans is graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His father, Bill Evans, owns and operates Evans Hotels, a series of San Diego-based resorts founded by his parents.
According to The New York Times, Holmes had a child with Evans in July 2021.
2022: Elizabeth Holmes is found guilty of fraud
Holmes’s criminal trial began in September 2021. Holmes, then 37, pled not guilty to 11 charges of fraud. To this day, she maintains her innocence.
The jury set out to determine whether Holmes deliberately deceived patients and investors about the efficacy of Theranos’ Edison and miniLab blood testing machines, or whether she was genuinely uninformed about the lab technology’s foibles, as she attested.
During the 15-week trial, jurors heard about 30 witnesses, including Theranos employee and whistleblower Erika Cheung, and from Holmes herself, who testified over seven days.
In January 2022, Holmes was found guilty on four out of the 11 charges, all of which were related to defrauding investors.
Theranos’ Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani faced the same charges as Holmes.
Balwani, nicknamed “Sunny,” made his fortune during the dot-com boom of the ‘90s and later worked alongside Holmes as the chief operating officer of Theranos. Balwani, 59, was charged with the same 11 fraud charges as Holmes, for which he has also pled not guilty.
As “The Dropout” shows, Holmes and Balwani had a romantic relationship that began prior to being colleagues at Theranos, and continued during their tenure at the start-up. In her testimony, Holmes accused Balwani of emotional and sexual abuse that took place during the relationship.
2022: Elizabeth Holmes is sentenced to over 11 years in prison, Sunny sentenced to 13 years
In November 2022, Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison after being found guilty of federal fraud charges in January that same year.
Balwani was sentenced to 13 years in prison, two years longer than Holmes. The harsher sentence came down to to “his experience running other businesses,” per NBC News.
2023: Holmes’ daughter is born
Holmes and Evans’ second child, a daughter named Invicta, was born in 2023.
2023: Elizabeth Holmes begins serving her prison sentence
Holmes began serving her 11-year prison sentence in May 2023. Just months into her time behind bars, a judge ordered that Holmes’ could be released two years earlier, NBC News reported.
As of July 2023, Holmes had an expected release date of Dec. 29, 2032, which put her approximately two years ahead of her scheduled release.
At the time, a spokesperson told NBC News that inmates can earn good conduct time, while others are eligible for an early released based on other mechanisms. The spokesperson would not provide additional information due to “privacy, safety and security reasons.”
Less than a year later, Holmes was ordered to be released two months prior to that. NBC News reported in May 2024 that Holmes’ updated released date was moved to Aug. 16, 2032.
2025: Elizabeth Holmes gives her first interview from prison
Holmes spoke to People for an interview published in 2025. In the interview, Holmes described her time in prison as “hell and torture.”
She told the publication that she continues to maintain her innocence, saying, “I refused to plead guilty to crimes I did not commit. Theranos failed. But failure is not fraud.”
Holmes also reflected on starting a family amid her legal battles. She recalled asking Evans “20 times if he wanted to spend his life with me. There were a million reasons why not.”
Being separated from her children “shatters her world,” she said.
