Who is Elizabeth Holmes and what did she do? Her $9 billion company had one machine, and it never worked
The investors who made Elizabeth Holmes a billionaire on paper included a media mogul, a future Secretary of Education and the family behind Walmart.
Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 to found Theranos in 2003. The pitch: a lab's worth of blood tests from a few drops taken with a finger prick, cheap and fast, at the corner drugstore. By 2014 Theranos was valued at $9 billion, and in 2015 Forbes named Holmes the youngest self-made female billionaire in America, worth $4.5 billion. If her name is back in your feed, it's because of You Can See Everything, the A24 documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim that opened October 16, 2026, and made $45.1 million in its first two weeks.
The machine
Everything Theranos sold depended on one device, the Edison. Blood went into the nanotainer, a vial 12.9 millimeters tall that held a couple of drops, and the Edison was supposed to do the rest.
In 2013, Walgreens agreed to put Theranos blood testing in its stores, starting with more than 40 locations. The money followed the promise:
- The Walton family — $150 million
- Rupert Murdoch — $121 million
- Betsy DeVos — $100 million
- The Cox family — $100 million
All of that money was riding on the Edison.
What the Edison actually did
In October 2015, John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal reported what former employees had told him. Theranos offered 240 tests. As of December 2014, the Edison ran 15 of them.
About 60 more ran on commercial machines built by other companies, including Siemens. A finger prick doesn't give those machines enough blood, so Theranos diluted the samples to make up the volume, which former employees linked to accuracy problems. Most of the rest came from ordinary needle draws from patients' veins, run on ordinary lab equipment.
The tests that did go through the Edison weren't much better. Erika Cheung, a former lab associate, testified at Holmes's trial in 2021 that the machines "frequently failed" quality control. Edison results for vitamin D, she said, sometimes came back at three times the level the standard machines found.
Holmes called the Journal a "tabloid" and went on CNBC's Mad Money the same night.
"First they think you're crazy, then they fight you," Holmes told Jim Cramer.
The line ends with "all of a sudden you change the world."
How it fell apart
Regulators got there next. In January 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said Theranos's lab in Newark, California, posed "immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety." In May, Theranos voided two years of Edison results, 2014 and 2015, and sent out tens of thousands of corrected test reports.
Walgreens ended the partnership in June 2016. The same month, Forbes revised Theranos's value to $800 million and Holmes's net worth to zero. In August, she unveiled a successor device, the miniLab, without data showing it could do what she said it could. Theranos shut down on September 4, 2018, three months after Holmes was indicted.
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The verdict
On January 3, 2022, a jury found Holmes guilty on four counts of defrauding investors. It acquitted her on the four counts involving patients, the people whose blood had gone through the machines. In November 2022, Judge Edward Davila sentenced her to 11 years and three months, and ordered her and her former business partner and boyfriend, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, to pay $452 million in restitution.
She reported to Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas on May 30, 2023. In March 2026, Davila cut her sentence by a year, and the Bureau of Prisons now lists her release for February 22, 2030.
What she says now
Holmes has never accepted the verdict. In her first interview from prison, given to People in February 2025, she put her case in seven words.
"Theranos failed. But failure is not fraud."
Fielder asks her about it in You Can See Everything: "You really feel you did nothing wrong?" Holmes answers, "I did not."
She has also told People that she still plans to return to health care technology. Her partner, Billy Evans, is already there. In 2025 he raised millions of dollars for a blood-testing startup called Haemanthus, Greek for "blood flower." The company's X account says: "This is not Theranos 2.0."
Previously we wrote: Tyler Perry, 'Atlanta's Lex Luthor,' now has a say in Georgia's next government