The Drop Out: Who is Elizabeth Holmes?
Photo Courtesy of IMDb
March 25, 2022
A 19 year old Stanford drop out, founder and CEO of a nine billion dollar company, and the ultimate con artist who scammed the world. The Dropout, a Hulu original, was just released on March 3 and has since caused an uproar among viewers. The Dropout tells the story of Elizabeth Holmes who was able to fool the world into believing her nine billion dollar company, Thernos, was going to change the way blood diagnostics and testing worked forever.
The story of Elizabeth Holmes begins in Beijing 2007 when she meets her soon to be boyfriend and COO of Theranos, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. With great ambition and a mature nature that separated her from her peers, Sunny took a liking to Holmes and became somewhat of a mentor throughout her time in Beijing.
Following that summer with Sunny, she attended Stanford University, which is known for its innovation and entrepreneurial opportunities. Her freshman year she utilized her genius to get her into one of the graduate research groups, which conducted experiments using biotechnology and chemical hypotheses.
At the beginning of her sophomore year at Stanford, she approached her professor leading the graduate group with an idea for a medical patch. She later went on to take her idea to a well-known physician who explained that her idea defied all laws of physics and was not possible.
Holmes, in her strong willed glory, decided she was going to make it work, so she changed her technology, while keeping the same goal of combining diagnosis and therapy. Soon after came the Edison, which was a device designed to do at home blood tests with just a prick of the finger and a drop of blood. This was revolutionary in the blood testing industry because for decades patients have been poked and prodded with needles and drained of blood. For the typical blood test, a patient needs to, on average, give at least a vile of blood.
Though she had such great vision, the process of constructing a functional device was a strenuous one, which had her team working upwards of 24 hours a day for months. When it came time to demo her device to large companies and powerful investors, she used fake data analysis to fool everyone into believing she had a working device.
After countless fake demos, she was able to construct a board for her company which included people like the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger and William Foege, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control. With such a credible board, the world was in awe of her innovation, especially at such a young age.
Her company ended up raising more than $400 million by 2014, after gaining news coverage just a year prior. By the time Theranos was valued at $9 billion, many started to become skeptical of the credibility and integrity of the company when tests were coming back significantly inaccurate, ex workers were coming forward with negative experiences, and no one had ever actually seen the device working on a real patient.
With much in question, Theranos started being exposed for their lies when it came to the surface that they were using third parties for testing, rather than the Edison itself. More and more came to light and eventually Theranos was shut down in 2018.
Following the shut down of Theranos, the United States charged Holmes and Sunny with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. This has a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison and potential fines.
Holmes is scheduled for sentencing on September 26, 2022 where she faces a lengthy term of prison time. Sunny will go to trial in 2022. If convicted, the defendants face a maximum sentence of twenty years in prison, and a fine of $250,000, plus restitution, for each count of wire fraud and for each conspiracy count.
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