Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
a file that frankly feels like it belongs in
the fiction section, you know, right next to
the books about dragons and time travel. But
it is all too real. It's a story about the absolute
zenith of Silicon Valley ambition colliding with,
I mean, just the darkest, murkiest depths of
human deception. It really is. We're talking
about the meteoric rise and the very long, very
public and, uh... very complicated fall of Elizabeth
Ann Holmes. It's a tragedy in the classical sense,
isn't it? It has all the components. You've got
the hubris, you've got this fatal flaw, and then
this catastrophic public unraveling. But unlike
a Greek play, you know, performed in an amphitheater,
this happened on the glossy covers of Forbes
and Fortune, and this is the scary part, in the
real blood -testing labs of Walgreens where actual
patients were rolling up their sleeves. Exactly.
And for everyone listening today, especially
the learners out there who don't just want the
headlines but want to understand the mechanism
of things. We're not just doing a true crime
rehash here. We aren't just going to say she
lied. No, that's too simple. We want to understand
the how. How does a 19 -year -old dropout convince
Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and some of the
world's most powerful investors that she has
invented a magical box that doesn't actually
exist? That is the central question. It's the
paradox of the whole story. And to answer it,
We've got a massive stack of sources today. We're
looking at comprehensive biographical data, the
original reporting from the Wall Street Journal,
of course. The Bible of this story. For sure.
Also, court documents from USV Holmes, details
from the Securities and Exchange Commission charges,
and crucially, updates on her incarceration as
of right now, early 2026. Right. And just to
set the scene for everyone, because context is
everything here, let's look at the contrast.
So rewind the clock to 2015. Elizabeth Holmes
is the world's youngest self -made female billionaire.
Self -made, key term. Yes, she's valued at $4
.5 billion personally. Her company, Theranos,
is valued at $9 billion. She's being hailed as
the next Steve Jobs. I mean, she is on top of
the world. And today, as we sit here in January
2026. Today, that valuation is zero. Actually,
it's probably less than zero if you count the
legal debts. And Elizabeth Holmes is inmate number
24965111 at the federal prison camp in Bryan,
Texas. Her release date is currently projected
for 2032. It is a stunning reversal. I mean,
it's one of the fastest, most spectacular crashes
in corporate history. And our mission today is
to unpack the psychology, the culture. And the
specific mechanics, the physics and the biology
of the fraud that made this all possible. Because
this isn't just about one person. It's about
a culture that sometimes fails to distinguish
between, you know, optimism and just lying. So
let's unpack this. We have to start at the very
beginning. Most people know the black turtleneck,
the blonde hair, the kind of unblinking stare.
Right. But they don't know about the yeast empire.
The yeast empire. Yes. This is such a fascinating
piece of family history that really. It explains
the engine driving her. It provides the why.
It sounds like a bad sci -fi novel, but it's
real history. Break it down for us. So Elizabeth
Holmes comes from a lineage that experienced
a massive fall from grace long before she was
ever born. Her paternal great -great -great -grandfather
was an aunt named Charles Louis Fleischman. As
in Fleischman's East. The little yellow packets
you buy at the grocery store for baking bread.
The very same. He founded the company. He revolutionized
the baking industry. And he built a massive fortune.
I mean, the Holmes family was at one point true
American royalty. Wow. They lived in grand estates.
They had society weddings. They had it all. But
as often happens over generations, the fortune
diluted and dissipated. You know, bad investments,
too many heirs, just time. By the time Elizabeth
came along, the money was largely gone. Consciousness
of the money remained. The story of it. That's
a dangerous mix. Growing up knowing you should
be royalty, but, you know, shopping at the mall
like everyone else. Precisely. There is a quote
in our sources from a family friend, a guy named
Joseph Fuse, who noted that Elizabeth's parents
yearned for the days of yore when the family
was rich. He said they lived with this heavy
sense of lost legacy. So she grows up with this
massive chip on her shoulder. It's not just ambition,
it's... It's a restoration project. She needs
to put the home's name back on the map. Fuse
said that Elizabeth channeled that desire for
restored glory from a very, very young age. She
wasn't just trying to be successful. She was
trying to reclaim an empire. And she was intense
about it. This wasn't a kid playing video games.
She wrote her first computer program in high
school. She learned Mandarin while still in high
school, attending a summer program at Stanford.
She was selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities
as a teenager. That is just wild. you know playing
video games and trying to avoid homework and
she's out there selling compilers to universities
in china right there's another detail about her
father christian holmes iv that feels like i
mean it's such heavy foreshadowing it's almost
too perfect for a movie script yes he was a vice
president at a subsidiary of enron enron you
literally cannot make this up her father worked
for the absolute symbol of corporate fraud in
the 90s the company that defined accounting tricks
and fake value. And his daughter grows up to
create the symbol of corporate fraud for the
2010s. It really connects to that fake it till
you make it mentality, doesn't it? It's almost
generational. But we have to give credit where
it's due. Elizabeth was clearly brilliant in
her youth. She gets into Stanford in 2002, studying
chemical engineering. Top school. Top school.
She's named a President's Scholar, which is a
huge honor. She gets a grant for research. She
is on the fast track. But then something happens
in her freshman year, or rather the summer after,
that changes her trajectory completely. And this
is a darker and more sensitive part of the story.
It is. In 2003, Holmes reported being raped while
at Stanford. This is a critical part of the narrative
because years later during her trial, she testified
that this trauma was a real pivot point for her.
She said she was questioning how to process that
experience, how to move forward. She testified
she decided she didn't want to go to class. She
wanted to build something. She wanted to build
a life by building a company. It was her way
of processing. So she drops out. She's 19 years
old. She takes her tuition money, which at Stanford
is not a small amount of cash, and she founds
a company called Real Time Tours. Which is a
terrible name, by the way. It's a little on the
nose, isn't it? Real -time cures. It sounds like
a scam immediately. Chuckles. It does. She later
changed it to Theranos, which is a combination
of therapy and diagnosis. Much sleeker. But the
pitch, the core idea, remained the same. She
was terrified of needles. Which is a brilliant
marketing hook. I mean, everybody hates needles.
I hate needles. If you tell me I can tell you
everything about your health without sticking
a giant needle in your arm, I am listening. 100%.
She claimed she wanted to democratize health
care by running hundreds of tests on just a few
droplets of blood from a finger prick. No big
vials, no scary veins, no tourniquets. Yeah.
Just a pinprick, a drop, and you know if you
have cancer, diabetes, high cholesterol, anything.
Here's where it gets really interesting to me.
and where we need to dig into the science because
usually in these founder stories you know think
of the wright brothers or steve jobs there's
an aha moment where the genius inventor proves
the skeptics wrong the experts say you can't
fly and then the wright brothers fly but in this
story the experts were just right That is the
reality check that she completely ignored. Before
she dropped out, she pitched this idea to Phyllis
Gardner, who is a professor of medicine at Stanford,
a total legend. She went to Gardner and said,
I want to build a patch or device that takes
a tiny drop of blood and tests for everything.
And Gardner didn't say, that's hard. She said.
That's impossible. Correct. And this is where
we need to explain why it's impossible, because
this isn't just Gardner being a naysayer or,
you know, stuck in her ways. It comes down to
basic fluid dynamics and biology. OK, lay it
on us. Why can't I just use a drop of blood?
All right. So think about how you get blood from
a finger prick. You aren't tapping a big, clean
vein. You're breaking capillaries in the tissue
of your fingertip. When you squeeze that finger.
To get the blood out, you aren't just getting
pure blood. You're getting what's called interstitial
fluid. Okay, that's the fluid that sits between
your cells. Exactly. It's the water, the lymph,
the tissue fluid, and it all mixes with the blood.
So right off the bat, your sample is diluted
and contaminated. It's not pure blood like you
get from a vein. So if you're trying to measure
a very specific level of a chemical like potassium
or something, and your sample is already watered
down with other fluids, your measurement is going
to be wrong. It's going to be wildly inconsistent.
But it gets worse. To get enough blood from a
finger prick for even one test is hard. To get
enough for hundreds of tests, like Holmes was
promising, you have to squeeze the finger really
hard. You have to milk it. Right. And when you
squeeze a finger that hard to force blood out,
you cause something called hemolysis. Which is
what, exactly? It's breaking the blood cells.
We're literally exploding the red blood cells
because of the physical pressure. Red blood cells
are these fragile little sacks. If you smash
them, they burst. And once they burst, the contents,
all the potassium, iron, enzymes, and sides spill
out into the plasma. So now your soup is completely
ruined. You've got things floating in the plasma
that shouldn't be there because the cells popped
and everything you're trying to measure is diluted.
Exactly. So you're starting with a contaminated,
diluted heme. Normalized sample. Phyllis Gardner
knew this. Every single pathologist in the world
knows this. It's not an engineering problem you
can solve with a better microchip. It is a physics
problem. Yeah. You cannot change the structural
integrity of a red blood cell just because you
have a startup and a good story. But Holmes didn't
listen. She didn't say, oh, good point, Professor
Gardner. She just. Went to someone else. She
went around her. She went to Channing Robertson,
who was the dean of engineering at the time.
Now, Robertson is a brilliant engineer, but he's
not a medical doctor. He's not a pathologist.
And he backed her. Why? I mean, why would the
dean of engineering back her if the medical professor
said it was physically impossible? I think it
really speaks to the hubris of Silicon Valley
at that time. There was this pervasive belief
that engineering could conquer biology. You know,
oh, doctors are just stuck in their ways. We're
engineers. We solve problems. Disruption mindset.
Totally. Plus, Elizabeth was incredibly charismatic.
She had that reality distortion field that people
talk about with Steve Jobs. Robertson was captivated.
He became a board member. He introduced her to
VCs. And he essentially gave her the academic
stamp of approval she needed to bypass all the
metal. And that becomes the pattern, doesn't
it? She bypasses the medical community entirely.
She goes straight to the money and the power.
So she starts this company. She's in stealth
mode for a decade, from 2003 to 2013. And during
this time, she builds what has been called the
most illustrious board in U .S. corporate history.
It really was a who's who of American geopolitical
power. But if you look at the names closely,
you start to see the trick. Okay, I'm looking
at the list here. We have George Shultz, former
Secretary of State. We have Henry Kissinger,
former Secretary of State. We have James Mattis,
a four -star general and future Secretary of
Defense. Sam Nunn, Bill Frist. Do you notice
a pattern there, other than them being famous?
They are all incredibly powerful. They're all
men. And they're all very old. Chuckles. Well,
yes. But more importantly, they are military
and political strategists. They're not medical
diagnostic experts. There's not a single doctor
from Johns Hopkins on that list. I won. George
Shultz joined the board after a two hour meeting
with Elizabeth. Two hours. And suddenly he's
backing a revolutionary medical device company.
It's insane. What did she do in those two hours?
Did she hypnotize him? She charmed him. She sold
a vision. You have to remember, these men, Kissinger,
Schultz, they were in their 80s and 90s. They
were thinking about their legacy. And this young,
brilliant woman comes to them with a technology
that she says could save lives on the battlefield,
could save the American health care system that
appealed to them. They wanted to be part of the
next big thing. It's the halo effect, right?
If I'm a regular investor, or even a sophisticated
one like the Waltham family or Betsy DeVos, and
I see Henry Kissinger and George Shultz on the
board, I just assume the due diligence has been
done. Of course. I assume Kissinger had his people
check the tech. But Kissinger assumed Schultz
checked the tech. And Schultz assumed Mattis
checked the tech. It was this circle of assumptions.
Nobody actually wanted to be the one to admit
they didn't understand the science. So they all
just deferred to each other's credibility. And
nobody looked inside the box. Nobody looked inside
the box. And she secured massive amounts of money
this way. The Walton family, Betsy DeVos, Rupert
Murdoch. These people put in hundreds of millions
of dollars. And lost. Every single penny. We
have to talk about the persona she built during
this time. Because it wasn't just the board.
It was the character of Elizabeth Holmes that
she created. The whole Steve Jobs cosplay. It
was absolutely deliberate. It was a costume.
It was theater. The black turtlenecks. She claimed
she'd been wearing them since she was eight years
old. Oh, yeah. That was her story. That was the
myth. But our sources show that an employee actually
suggested she cost Steve Jobs signature is see
me off. They look back in 2007. She adopted the
uniform to create a visual shorthand for genius.
You see the black turtleneck. You think of Apple.
You think of innovation. And then, of course,
the voice, the deep baritone. I think everyone
who followed this story remembers the voice.
It was incredibly deep, almost. Unnaturally so
for a woman in her 20s. It was a huge point of
contention for years. Family members insisted
it was her real voice, but former colleagues,
one after another, said she would slip. They
said if she got excited or had a few drinks at
a party or was just caught off guard, her voice
would jump up an octave into a much more typical
young woman's range. And we finally got the truth.
In a New York Times interview in May 2023, this
was right before she went to prison, she admitted
it. She said the low voice was an affectation.
Which is a very polite way of saying fake. It
is. Why do that? Why consciously lower your voice?
What is the psychology there? It's all about
authority. I mean, there's plenty of research
showing that deeper voices are perceived as...
more authoritative, more leader -like, more trustworthy.
As a 20 -something young woman in a room full
of old men and venture capitalists, she was playing
a role. She wanted to sound older. She wanted
to sound like a CEO. She was literally method
-acting her way through a billion -dollar fraud.
And it worked. By 2014... The hype is at a fever
pitch. She is on the cover of Fortune, Forbes,
Inc. President Obama names her the presidential
ambassador for global entrepreneurship. She's
getting honorary degrees. It's peak hype. And
that hype was dangerous because it acted as a
shield. It shielded the company from scrutiny.
When you are the golden child, when you're on
the cover of Forbes wearing the black turtleneck,
people are afraid to ask tough questions. Yeah,
you don't want to look stupid. You don't want
to look stupid by questioning the genius. But
the tough questions needed to be asked because
inside the Theranos lab, things were, well, they
were absolutely chaotic. Let's talk about the
technology, the Edison. This was the little black
box that's supposed to change the world. The
Edison. It was roughly the size of a desktop
printer. The claim, the big promise, was that
you put the nanotainer, that tiny little vial
of fingerprick blood, into the machine, and it
runs hundreds of assays. Chemistry, a venoassay,
the works. And the reality. The reality was that
the Edison was a complete disaster. It was mechanically
unreliable. The little centrifuge inside spun
so fast that parts would literally fly off and
break the casing. It got too hot, which destroyed
the sample. And fundamentally, because of the
science we discussed earlier, the hemolyzed blood,
the small volume, the results were just all over
the map. So if I tested my potassium on an Edison,
it might say I'm fine on Monday, and then on
Tuesday it might say I'm about to have a heart
attack purely by chance. Correct. It was basically
a random number generator. But here's the problem.
They had already signed a massive company -making
partnership with Walgreens. They had promised
to put these wellness centers in stores across
Arizona and California. So how do you fulfill
the contracts if your magical machine doesn't
work? You cheat. You cheat on an industrial scale.
The investigation by John Kerry Rue revealed
that Theranos was secretly buying commercially
available blood analyzers from companies like
Siemens. These are big, standard... FDA -approved
lab machines that every other hospital in the
country uses. And they just hid them in the back
room? They hid them in the back room. They called
the project the Shire internally. But here's
the next problem. The Siemens machine is designed
for a big vial of venous blood drawn from your
arm. Theranos only had the tiny nanotainer from
the finger prick. The sample was way too small
for the Siemens machine to even recognize it.
So they couldn't even use the cheating machine
properly. Exactly. It's like trying to put a
thimble full of gas in a car. The sensor won't
even register it, so they had to hack the sample.
They would take that tiny drop of blood and dilute
it. They would add water or saline to bulk up
the volume so the Siemens machine would accept
it. But if you dilute the blood, you dilute all
the markers you're looking for. If I take a shot
of espresso and dump it in a gallon of water,
it's not espresso anymore. Precisely. If you're
looking for a specific protein and you water
the sample down 10 to 1, the machine is going
to report a number that is way, way too low.
So Theranos engineers had to come up with these
secret correction factors. They were essentially
doing math on a napkin to guess what the real
number should have been. That is absolutely terrifying.
So to recap. They were taking a bad sample, diluting
it to make it even worse, running it on a machine
it wasn't designed for, and then just guessing
the result using a multiplication table. And
then sending that result to a real patient who
might be changing their chemotherapy dosage or
their blood thinner medication based on it. Yes,
that is exactly what they did. Unbelievable.
And the financial fraud was just as blatant.
I'm looking at these numbers from the indictment.
In 2014, they told investors they had $100 million
in revenue. And the actual real revenue that
year was roughly $100 ,000. That isn't rounding
up. That isn't optimistic accounting. That is
a lie of a thousandfold magnitude. It's pure
fiction. And they also lied about the military.
This is the one that really, I think, angered
people on a gut level. Holmes repeatedly claimed
her technology was being used by the Department
of Defense in combat situations, in medevac helicopters
in Afghanistan. She told investors this over
and over. And was it? Never. Not once. Not for
a single test. It was a complete fabrication
to gain this kind of patriotic credibility and
make the technology seem battle tested. So how
do they keep this quiet for so long? hundreds
of employees, someone has to know the machine
is a dud. Someone has to see the Siemens machines
hidden in the back. This brings us to the culture
of fear inside the company and specifically to
a man named Ramesh Sunny Balwani. The mysterious
Sunny. We need to unpack this relationship because
it's at the core of everything. Sunny Balwani
was the president and chief operating officer
of Theranos. But more importantly, he was Elizabeth's
secret romantic partner. They met in 2002 on
a trip to China. She was 18, just graduated high
school. He was 37 and married at the time. They
started a romantic relationship that they kept
secret from the board, the investors, and almost
every employee for over a decade. That power
dynamic is, I mean, it's incredibly complex.
An 18 -year -old and a 37 -year -old. And then
he comes to work as her number two. It's extremely
complex. He came on officially as COO in 2009,
and the culture they created together was described
by prosecutors as a folie a deux. a shared madness.
They reinforced each other's delusions. Right.
But inside the company, Balwani was the enforcer.
He was the muscle. He was the bad cop? He was
the terrifying cop. The testimony from former
employees is chilling. He monitored their emails.
He tracked when people swiped their badge to
enter or leave the building. He would roam the
hall shouting at people. If you raised a concern,
if you asked a simple question like, hey, why
are the quality control results failing? You
were marginalized, you were shouted at, or you
were fired on the spot. So they built these information
silos. Nobody in the chemistry department knew
what the engineering department was doing. Dysfunctional
doesn't even begin to cover it. It was a surveillance
state within a startup. They bullied anyone who
tried to speak up. It was this intense pressure
cooker designed to keep the truth from ever escaping.
But the truth always escapes eventually. Physics
always wins. And in this case, the truth escaped
via a tip to a reporter named John Kerry Roo
at The Wall Street Journal. This is the turning
point. This is where the story shifts from a
rise to a fall. A medical expert, a blogger actually,
suspected the Edison device was suspicious because
the results were just medically implausible.
He tipped off Kerry Roo. Kerry Roo started digging.
He found and talked to whistleblowers, including
a young man named Tyler Schultz, who was George
Schultz's own grandson. He had worked at Theranos
and saw the fraud firsthand and tried to warn
his grandfather, who didn't believe him. And
Holmes didn't take this lying down. She didn't
just ignore it. She went to war. Oh, absolutely.
She and her superstar lawyer, David Boies, one
of the most famous and feared litigators in America,
went on the offensive. They threatened the journal
with massive legal action. They threatened the
whistleblowers with financial ruin. They hired
private investigators to follow Tyler Schultz.
They tried to intimidate everyone into silence.
But the Wall Street Journal is a tough nut to
crack. And on October 15, 2015, the bombshell
dropped. The article was published, laying it
all out. And the house of cards began to collapse
almost overnight. I remember seeing her on TV
that very day. It was incredible. She didn't
hide. She went on Mad Money with Jim Cramer.
She looked right in the camera, totally calm.
And she said something that I think perfectly
encapsulates the Silicon Valley martyr complex.
I know the exact quote you mean. It's iconic
now. She said, this is what happens when you
work to change things. First, they think you're
crazy. Then they fight you. And then all of a
sudden you change the world. It is a brilliant
deflection tactic. It's genius in a way. She
framed the legitimate exposure of criminal fraud
as the innovator's dilemma. She tried to align
herself with Galileo or Einstein. These geniuses
who are persecuted by the establishment. They're
just attacking me because I'm disrupting the
system. Exactly. The big labs are scared of us.
But the problem was Galileo's telescope actually
worked. Juckles. Right. That's a key difference.
You can't use the they're fighting me defense
if your product is fake. If you claim you can
fly and you jump off a cliff and fall, gravity
isn't persecuting you. Gravity is just holding
you accountable. Exactly. And the accountability
came fast. After that article, the regulatory
collapse was swift. The Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services, or CMS, inspected their
lab in Newark, California. And they didn't find
innovation. They found an immediate hazard. What
did they find, specifically? They found massive
irregularities, uncalibrated machines, unqualified
staff, and a complete failure in quality control.
Their report said the lab posed immediate jeopardy
to patient health and safety. They banned Holmes
from operating a lab for two years. And once
the regulator stepped in, Walgreens bolted. They
had to. They terminated the partnership immediately.
The state of Arizona sued Theranos for selling
1 .5 million fraudulent tests to their citizens
while concealing the facts. And this is the part
that just hurts to think about. They had to void
two years of blood test results. Think about
that for a second. Real people made real medical
decisions based on those tests. It's the human
cost. Imagine you're a cancer patient. You take
a test to see if your tumor markers are rising.
The Theranos test comes back and says, you're
fine, your numbers are low. So your doctor doesn't
change your chemo regimen. But actually, your
numbers are high, the cancer is growing, you
lost precious time. Or the reverse, you get a
false positive for HIV or syphilis, and your
entire life falls apart for a week until you
can get a retest from a real lab. The emotional
damage is immense. That is the difference between
this and just a regular financial scam like FPX
or Bernie Madoff. This wasn't just money disappearing
from a spreadsheet. It was people's physical
health and well -being on the line. Exactly.
And that leads us to the inevitable conclusion,
the trial. In June 2018, a federal grand jury
indicts Holmes and Balwani. Two counts of conspiracy
to commit wire fraud and a whole bunch of counts
of wire fraud itself. The trial didn't start
until 2021, though. It was delayed by the COVID
-19 pandemic and then by Holmes' first pregnancy.
But when it did, the defense strategy was fascinating.
And I want to spend a moment on it because legally,
it was a real high wire act. The Svengali defense,
that's what people called it. Essentially, yes.
Holmes took the stand for seven days, which is
very rare for a defendant in a major fraud trial.
Usually, your lawyers tell you to stay quiet.
But she's incredibly charming. She thinks she
can talk her way out of anything. So what was
her story? She admitted she was misled by some
of her staff, but the core of her defense was
placing the blame squarely on Sunny Balwani.
She testified that he was controlling and sexually
abusive. She said he wanted to kill the person
she was in order to create a new Elizabeth. It
was harrowing testimony. She described a decade
of psychological dominance, controlled schedules,
dictated diets, isolation from her family. Her
argument was essentially, I didn't have the specific
intent to defraud because I wasn't in control
of my own mind. I was his puppet. It's a strategy
to negate intent, which is a key element of fraud.
To be guilty, you have to knowingly lie. If you
can convince the jury you were brainwashed, maybe
you didn't know. But the prosecution countered
with a mountain of receipts. They showed texts
and emails where she was clearly the one directing
the fraud. They showed that when she was lying
to investors or putting fake Pfizer logos on
reports, Sonny wasn't even in the room. She was
the one in charge. And the jury had to make a
decision. In January of 2022, the verdict came
down. And it was mixed. It was complicated. It
was a split verdict. And this confuses a lot
of people. She was found guilty on four counts
of defrauding investors, but she was found not
guilty on the four counts related to defrauding
patients. OK, let's break that down. If the patients
were the ones who were physically hurt, why is
she not guilty of that, but guilty of taking
Rupert Murdoch's money? It comes down to the
technicality of the wire fraud statutes and the
burden of proof. The investors were pitched directly
by Holmes. She looked them in the eye or sent
them an email and lied to get their money. That's
a very clear, direct line of deception. Okay.
The patients, she never met them. They interacted
with a Walgreens or a website. The chain of deception
was longer and more indirect. It doesn't mean
the jury thought she didn't hurt patients. It
just means the strict legal bar for criminal
wire fraud, specifically targeting those individual
patients, wasn't met beyond a reasonable doubt
for the prosecution. So she is convicted on the
investor fraud. She's sentenced to 11 .25 years
in federal prison and ordered to pay $452 million
in restitution. Jointly with Balwani, I should
add. He was convicted in a separate trial on
all 12 counts, actually. He got a slightly longer
sentence. So let's fast forward. We are now in
the present day, January 2026. Where is Elizabeth
Holmes? What's happening? Physically, she is
in Bryan, Texas. She reported to the federal
prison camp there on May 30th, 2023. It's a minimum
security facility. And she didn't go quietly.
Before prison, she went through a bit of a rebrand.
The Liz rebrand. It was remarkable. As soon as
the company officially collapsed, the black turtlenecks
vanished. She started wearing soft pastels, let
her hair down, and started going by Liz. She
met a man named Billy Evans, a hotel heir, at
a party. They got married pretty quickly. And
they had two children, one born in 2021 and another
in 2023, just months before she was due to report
to prison. And there was a lot of cynicism about
those pregnancies. Prosecutors argued in court
filings that she was tough. Timing them to delay
her prison sentence, they basically said, she's
having babies to stay out of jail. Which she
denied, of course. She did. But it certainly
complicated the sentencing optics. It's a much
harder thing for a judge to send a mother of
a newborn to prison than a single CEO. But the
judge, Edward Davla, eventually ruled she had
to surrender. So she has been in prison for over
two and a half years now. What is the status
of her fight for freedom? Because she hasn't
stopped fighting. It is not going well for her.
Her lawyers appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court
of Appeals. They argued there were all these
legal errors in the trial, specifically about
which expert witnesses were allowed and the exclusion
of some of Balwani's testimony regarding the
abuse. And what happened with that appeal? As
of February 2025, so almost a year ago now, those
appeals were rejected. The conviction stands.
The appellate court essentially said the trial
was fair. The evidence was overwhelming. The
conviction holds. So she's stuck. She's running
out of road. Mostly. Her sentence was shortened
slightly due to federal good conduct guidelines.
Prisoners rarely serve 100 percent of their sentence
if they behave. The Bureau of Prisons currently
projects her release for some time in 2032. So
she has about six more years to go. But she hasn't
given up on the public eye, has she? She's not
just, you know, quietly serving her time. Not
at all. In August 2025, she started posting on
social media via third parties. Obviously, inmates
don't have iPhones, but she communicates out
to her family. And then there was a report in
December of 2025 that she was campaigning for
a presidential pardon from Donald Trump. Of course
she is. She's trying to bypass the legal system
again, just like she bypassed the medical system.
Go straight to the top. But the most shocking
thing to me, and this really gets to the core
psychology of it, is the interview she gave from
prison in 2025. Yes, I read this. It made my
jaw drop. After years of silence and after the
trial where she basically had to admit to all
this fraud, she gave an interview where she stated
that she still intends to revolutionize the medical
testing industry. She said she has ideas for
new patents she's working on. Wait, wait, really?
She's sitting in a prison cell convicted of a
massive fraud for a medical testing company that
didn't work. And she says, I'm still going to
do it. That is the persistence of the vision
or the delusion, depending on how you see it.
It suggests that on some deep level, she doesn't
see herself as a criminal. She sees herself as
a failed visionary who just ran out of time and
money. She still thinks if she just had a bit
more, she could have made the Edison work. That
is deeply unsettling. It's like she hasn't learned
the fundamental lesson. Or maybe the lesson she
learned is just don't get caught next time. It
raises the question, did she ever truly believe
the lie? And I think in a twisted way, she believed
in the mission so much that the lying was just
a necessary stepping stone. She thought, I'll
lie now. But once the tech works, the lie retroactively
becomes truth. But the tech never worked. Let's
talk about the crater she left behind. The cultural
impact of this story is just massive. It's not
just a business story anymore. It's become a
legend, a myth. It really has. We have the book
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, which is just a
masterpiece of investigative journalism. Then
we have the Hulu series The Dropout, where Amanda
Seyfried won an Emmy for her portrayal of Holmes.
It became a cultural touchstone. Seyfried was
so good that Jennifer Lawrence, who was supposed
to play Holmes in a big movie directed by Adam
McKay, dropped out. She said. We don't need to
redo that. She did it. But there's a darker side
to this cultural impact. It's not just entertainment.
It had a real tangible negative effect on women
trying to make it in the tech world. Absolutely.
The female founder stigma. Before Holmes, it
was already incredibly hard for women to get
venture capital funding. The stats are just abysmal.
Something like 2 % of all VC money goes to companies
founded solely by women. Just 2%. After Holmes,
it got worse. Female entrepreneurs, especially
in biotech or Health Tech, reported that investors
were bringing up Theranos constantly in pitch
meetings. They'd pitch a legitimate company with
real science and the investor would say, wait,
is this another Theranos? Are you the next Elizabeth
Holmes? That is so deeply unfair. Yeah. Nobody
looks at Sam Bankman -Fried from FTX and says
to every male crypto founder, are you the next
SPF? Nobody looks at Adam Neumann from WeWork
and judges all male real estate guys. But because
Elizabeth Holmes was so singular, so visible,
she became the archetype. It's a pernicious comparison,
as the New York Times put it in an article. She
became the face of the female fraudster, and
innocent women trying to build legitimate science
companies paid a real price for her crimes. And
the irony is, she launched that initiative, hashtag
Iron Sisters, specifically to help women in STEM.
And in the end, she might have done more damage
to women in STEM than almost anyone else in that
decade. She completely poisoned the well. So
to wrap this all up, what does this all mean?
We have a woman who wanted to be the next Steve
Jobs, who wanted to build a yeast empire of her
own and ended up in a minimum security prison
in Texas. I think the core tragedy is the corruption
of a good idea. Democratizing health care is
a noble goal. Fear of needles is real. Cheap,
accessible blood tests would save millions of
lives. If Theranos had actually worked, it would
have been a miracle. The tragedy isn't that she
failed. It's that she refused to admit she failed.
She chose to fake the success rather than do
the hard, grueling work of solving the problem
or, you know, admitting it couldn't be solved
with her approach. It's the ultimate cautionary
tale of that specific Silicon Valley culture.
Fake it till you make it works for a dating app.
If the app crashes, nobody dies. You just reboot
the server. But it doesn't work for medicine.
It can't work for medicine. Medicine is biology.
And biology doesn't care about your reality distortion
field. Biology is physics and chemistry. You
can't charm a red blood cell. You can't negotiate
with a protein. Chuckles. You can't charm a red
blood cell. I love that. They should be on a
T -shirt. And here's a final thought to leave
you with, which is something that keeps me up
at night. Elizabeth Holmes is projected to get
out of prison in 2032. She will be 48 years old.
She is still clearly ambitious. She still believes
she has a destiny to fulfill. Oh, boy. I see
where you're going with this. In a world that
loves a redemption arc and in a world where truth
is increasingly subjective, have we truly heard
the last of Elizabeth Holmes? Or is this just
the intermission before the second act? That
is a terrifying thought. If she comes back with
a new startup in 2033, I'm not investing. I don't
care who is on the board. Henry Kissinger's ghost
could be on the board. Chuckles. I think I'll
keep my money in the mattress for that one. Thank
you for listening to this deep dive into the
rise and fall of the unicorn. We hope this gave
you a clear picture of the mechanics behind the
curtain. We'll catch you on the next one. Stay
curious and maybe double check your lab results.
Indeed. Goodbye.