A woman named Elizabeth Holmes was adored six years ago, especially after Forbes magazine declared her 'the world's youngest self-made female billionaire' and 'The Next Steve Jobs'. Now, everything changed because he was accused of being a billion dollar fraud from his investors.
How about Elizabeth Holmes story? Before facing the threat of decades in prison, he was someone who dropped out of college. He is known to lie to the government and some of the world's richest people such as Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger and Larry Ellison.
The deception that Holmes does is to create a narrative that he managed to make test kits for various health conditions with only a small amount of blood. Of course, the tests didn't work, especially since Holmes apparently had no history of medical training and such.
His company has also been accused of frequently issuing false test results. One patient whose blood was tested was said to have miscarried while pregnant, another was told he was HIV positive when he wasn't.
After a number of investigations, the company, which was at one point worth more than $9 billion, finally collapsed in 2018. California law has Holmes charged with four counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud.
Holmes initially hoped to emulate his great-grandfather. His great-grandfather co-founded Fleischmann's Yeast which revolutionized the bakery industry in the late 1800s. At the age of nine, he told his father that what he really wanted out of life was to discover something new, in other words to be an inventor.
When he was a 19-year-old student at Stanford University, he thought he had found his dream. He also founded Theranos in 2003. Full of confidence, he convinced his parents to let him drop out of university and cash in on the education fund they had set up for him. He used it to rent a lab and hire his first employees.
Holmes' desire to increase medical testing was fueled by the family's aversion to needles, which could have caused her mother and grandmother to faint at the sight of blood.
"I really do believe that if we come from an alien planet and we sit here and say, 'OK, let's brainstorm a torture experiment', the concept of sticking a needle into someone and sucking blood slowly, while the person is watching, maybe qualify," he told the New Yorker in 2014.
Holmes often looks like Steve Jobs, wearing a black turtleneck. He quickly became a star and spoke in public. He even hosted a TedMed conference in 2014.
The stories of Holmes' scams began to come to light in 2015. Immediately, after Theranos hit a record $9 billion valuation, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou began an investigation into the legitimacy of the company's tests.
When Carreyrou went to Holmes to comment on his story, he asked the Journal's owner, Rupert Murdoch - a Theranos investor - to prevent its publication. But still, no matter how smart the squirrel jumps, it will eventually fall. This was reported by The Guardian, Thursday (27/1/2022).