People have been curious about Elizabeth Holmes’ wealth since Theranos went out of business. The founder and former CEO of a health technology company in Silicon Valley was the youngest woman to become a billionaire on her own. However, things have changed dramatically for Elizabeth Holmes’ wealth.
The young Holmes entered the world on February 3, 1984, in the nation’s capital. Her mother, Noel, worked on a Congressional committee, and her father, Christian, was a vice president at the energy conglomerate Enron before moving on to government positions at organizations like USAID. When she was a young girl, Holmes and her family relocated from Washington, D.C., to Houston, TX.
Holmes showed an innate propensity for innovation early on, frequently filling entire notebooks with sketches of proposed plans and designs. She told her father in a letter when she was nine, “What I want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn’t know was possible to do.”
When Holmes was in high school, he frequently stayed up late to get his homework done. She quickly became the top student in her Chinese computer science class. Eventually, she started her own company selling C++ compilers (software used to translate computer code) to universities. While still in high school, Holmes began studying Mandarin and eventually traveled to Beijing as part of a Stanford University summer program.
At this time, Holmes decided she wanted to pursue medicine like her great-great-grandfather, a surgeon. However, she quickly realized that she was afraid of needles. Later, Holmes revealed that this inspired her to launch her company, Theranos, which sought to revolutionize blood testing with technology that purportedly required only a finger pinprick to detect medical conditions from cancer to high cholesterol.
It was only the beginning of what would soon be a meteoric rise in Elizabeth Holmes’ wealth, only to fall again. Continue reading to find out what happened to Elizabeth Holmes’ wealth, from how much she stole and what is Elizabeth Holmes’ net worth now?
How Much Money Did Elizabeth Holmes Stole?
Once Holmes launched Theranos, her former Stanford advisor, Channing Roberston, put her in touch with potential investors. By 2004, the young entrepreneur had raised almost $6 million in venture financing from several well-known investors. Over the following decade, it is expected that Holmes will raise over $700 million for Theranos.
There was no public company website or press releases for years, and investors were kept in the dark about the true nature of her technology. In 2013, Theranos expanded its visibility to the public by forming a partnership with Walgreens to open blood sample collection stations inside the pharmacy chain’s locations.
At the age of 30, Holmes became the youngest self-made woman billionaire, and she began to make headlines around this time as she gave talks, spoke on panels, and appeared on the covers of Fortune and Forbes. At its apex, Theranos was said to be worth $9 billion.
Something, however, didn’t seem quite right. According to an investigation by Nick Bilton published in Vanity Fair, Theranos’ chief scientist and an early hire, Ian Gibbons, found flaws in the company’s technology and expressed concerns to Holmes that the tests weren’t ready for public use.
Experts from outside the company also started to voice their concerns about Theranos. These concerns reached a head in 2015 when medical research professors John Ioannidis and then Eleftherios Diamandis cast doubt on the efficacy of her company’s technology.
By the end of the year, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou had published a scathing investigation into Theranos, alleging that the company’s blood-testing machine, Edison, did not produce reliable results. Theranos, on the other hand, was not using artificial intelligence to perform its blood tests but rather conventional laboratory equipment. Holmes allegedly lied to potential backers, including financiers, medical professionals, and patients.
After reading the WSJ article, the FDA decided to look into Theranos. Multiple violations of Title 21 of the Food and Drug Administration’s regulations were discovered during the 2015 investigation. Similarly, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services opened an investigation into a Theranos lab in Newark, California, in January 2016 after discovering testing irregularities.
After several months of appeals, CMS finally issued a two-year ban on Holmes from owning or operating a clinical blood-testing laboratory. The medical community, state and federal agencies, investors, and individual patients proceeded to file lawsuits and seek fines against Theranos in the following years. The company’s remnants were dissolved in September 2018 following years of litigation.
Elizabeth Holmes’ Net Worth: How Rich is She?
How much money does Elizabeth Holmes have right now? Forbes estimates that Elizabeth Holmes’ net worth has dropped from $4.5 billion before the collapse of Theranos to zero by 2022. In addition to former firm president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the former company’s founder and CEO was also charged with fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2018. The same year, Holmes and Balwani were indicted for wire fraud and conspiracy by the US Attorney for the Northern District of California.
Due to her pregnancy, Holmes’ trial has been pushed back to August 2020. Her trial started in August of 2021, a full year later. Holmes was found guilty of three charges of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud on January 3, 2022. Holmes could spend up to 80 years in prison and pay up to $1 million in fines if found guilty on all charges. Holmes is currently out on bail until his September 2022 sentencing.
Is Elizabeth Holmes’s A Billionaire?
Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO of Theranos, has wanted to become a billionaire since she was a child. Her greatest hopes were realized in this one specific regard. Forbes calculated her wealth in 2015, at the height of her success, to be $4.5 billion.
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