An entrepreneur, Elizabeth Holmes, once dubbed the ‘world’s youngest female self-made billionaire’ faces twenty years in prison as she awaits a fraud trial.
Elizabeth Holmes is accused of deceiving patients and investors of her;medical tech start-up, ‘Theranos’, which at one point was valued at 7 billion dollars.
‘Theranos’ promised to run hundreds of medical tests using a single drop of blood;using its technology, but it never lived up to expectations, and never worked at all.
Holmes is alleged to have overhyped claims about the company’s financial performance before it went viral in 2018. Her major investors included Rupert Murdoch, who put in 121million dollars, and the Walmart’s Walton family, who invested 150million dollars.
More than 700million dollars was put in altogether by venture capitalists, but;this proved to be totally worthless when the company collapsed.
It can be recalled that Holmes started promoting her product in 2013;when she was just 29 years old, and she ended up on the covers of business magazines such as Forbes, Fortune, and Inc. More so,. Meanwhile,. Yet,. Nonetheless,. Also,. Meanwhile,.
The college dropout’s black turtleneck led to her being compared to the late Apple boss Steve Jobs. She gained such a reputation and she was even appointed as a presidential ambassador for global entrepreneurship by Barack Obama.
Holmes’ medical tech start-up, ‘Theranos’, quickly lost steam after revelations that its breakthrough: blood-testing machine, ‘Edison’, didn’t work as Holmes had described. It was shown to produce dangerously inaccurate results in tests run for actual patients.
Holmes set to testify
However, Holmes is expected to testify that some of her statements and actions were the result of abuse inflicted by the company’s Chief Operating Officer and her secret lover, Ramesh Balwani. Meanwhile,. Also,. More so,. However,. That notwithstanding,. Nonetheless,.
According to court papers, Ms. Holmes is expected to claim that her former partner controlled what she wore, what she ate, and when she slept. Her lawyers are also determine to argue that she believed everything about her technology to be true but Balwani’s “manipulation” impaired her judgment.
Meanwhile, Balwani is facing multiple fraud charges in a separate trial and his lawyers have denied Holmes’s allegations, branding them “outrageous, salacious and inflammatory”. Meanwhile,. More so,. Moreover,. However,. Also,. Yet,. Meanwhile,.
- HushPuppi can get a maximum sentence of 20 years if convicted
- Mo Abudu’s Ebonylife Studios to co-produce a movie based on Hushpuppi
A thirst for success led to fraud?
Inventor and businessman, Richard Fuisz speculates there must have been immense pressure on Ms. Holmes to succeed. His family lived next door to the Holmes for years but they fell out when ‘Theranos’ sued him over a patent dispute in 2011 (it was later settled). More so,. However
Mr. Fuiz in an interview disclosed that Ms. Holmes’ parents spent much of their careers as bureaucrats on Capitol Hill but “they were very interested in status” and “lived for connections”. Meanwhile,. Also,. However,. More so,. However,. That notwithstanding,. Meanwhile,.
“Her father’s great-great-grandfather founded Fleischmann’s Yeast, which changed America’s bread industry, and the family was very conscious about its lineage”.
Mr. Fuiz
It is worth mentioning that at age nine, the young Elizabeth Holmes wrote a letter to her father declaring that what she “really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn’t know was possible to do”.
When she got to Stanford University in 2002 to study chemical engineering, she came up with an idea for a patch that could scan the wearer for infections and release antibiotics as needed. More so,. Meanwhile,. Also,. However,. That notwithstanding More so, Meanwhile,. However,. Also,. Yet,. Also,. However,. Nonetheless,.
Phyllis Gardner, an expert in clinical pharmacology at Stanford, recalled discussing Ms. Holmes’s skin patch idea and telling her it “wouldn’t work”.
“She just stared through me and she just seemed absolutely confident of her own brilliance. She wasn’t interested in my expertise and it was upsetting”.
Phyllis Gardner
