Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of disgraced blood testing company Theranos, is being tried for 12 charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The trial is expected to last through December.
Theranos was valued as high as $9 billion, and Holmes was a darling of Silicon Valley, sporting black turtlenecks that prompted comparisons to Steve Jobs. That is, until John Carreyrou’s exposé was published in The Wall Street Journal. In that article, Carreyrou wrote that Theranos was using its own device for only a handful of tests and that other employees were concerned that the device wasn’t accurate.
Then it came out that Theranos’ labs weren’t up to par and its partnerships with Safeway and Walgreens fell apart. Also, Theranos junked two years’ worth of test results. Eventually, Holmes was banned from operating labs, and Theranos dissolved in 2018. Now, the question is whether Holmes deliberately misled patients and investors.
