Why is Elizabeth Holmes the most talked about ex-billionaire? Well, I guess the question answers itself. Five years ago, Elizabeth Holmes made it to the cover of Forbes, she was only 31 years old and worth $4.5 billion.
When you are in your early thirties and make almost $400,000 dollars annually and ranked one of America’s 50 richest people.
you invariably get famous, very famous. Invariably, you become even more famous or shall we say infamous, when you lose all that money.
But who is Elizabeth Holmes? The self-made billionaire, correction, the former millionaire is the CEO of Theranos, a company that in that year, 2015, was valued at $9 billion.
Elizabeth Holmes owned over 50% of the blood-testing organization. Only one year later, the feds crashed the company on fraud charges and with it, down crashed the CEO.
In 2016, Forbes reevaluated Elizabeth Holmes to be at a net worth of zero dollars. As is that is not enough, Elizabeth Holmes
Not only had no money, literally, but she was also actually in debt and not any cheap change, she owed the organization a shocking $25 million dollars.
Well, been in debt is one thing, but when you are charged for a federal crime like fraud, you are looking at time behind bars. In 2018, Elizabeth Holmes was charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The charged accused her of taking more than $700 million from financial investors. She was banned from filling in as an executive of a public organization for the next 10 years and paid a fine of $500,000, right along with 19 million shares, of the company that she built.
Background
Born in 1984 in Washington, D.C. Elizabeth Holmes got a degree in electrical and chemical engineering from the prestigious Stanford University.
She spent time in China and it is believed that her inspiration for the blood-testing company Theranos came to her while at the Genome Institute of Singapore back in 2002, where she was an intern doing research and testing for SARS, the dreaded Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or.
The following year, in 2003 she went back to the U.S. and applied for and secured a patent to test drug and change the medication’s measurements as required.
With that, she went on to form Theranos and set up research centres where she carried out drug testing. In her research facilities, Elizabeth Holmes claimed to have the capacity and technology to run over 1,000 medicinal tests from just a few drops of blood.
Investors were watering for the company and about a decade into the business, Elizabeth Holmes took the company public in 2014.
Theranos conducted a lot, a lot of fundraising and pocketed in excess of $700 million. Only for years in the limelight, and the feds started investigating her for misdirecting financial specialists and contravening the legislature.
In 2018 all hell broke loose for Elizabeth Holmes when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accused her of ‘misleading investors by fraud through false or overstated cases about the precision of her blood-testing innovation.’
Forbes, which had propped Elizabeth Holmes as a self-made, young billionaire flipped the description to “World’s Most Disappointing Leaders.”
In June of 2018, Elizabeth Holmes and her lover and co-owner of Theranos Mr Ramesh Balwani faced a sentence of 20 years in jail.
Elizabeth Holmes Net Worth
The former billionaire and lover are currently charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud and along with the jail sentence may also pay a fine of $250,000, plus restitution, for each count.
With such a dramatic rise and fall, it is no surprise that Elizabeth Holmes is the subject of the book, Bad Blood by Wall Street Journal and an upcoming movie that is coordinated by Director Adam McKay and featuring Jennifer Lawrence as Elizabeth Holmes.
