Elizabeth Holmes

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Elizabeth Holmes, 2014

Elizabeth Holmes (* 3. February 1984 in Washington, DC ) is a former American biotechnology - entrepreneur . She was the managing director of the laboratory company Theranos. To start the company, she dropped out of Stanford University in 2003 and later held a 50% stake in the company. The Time magazine counted in 2015 to the most influential hundred people in the world . In the same year it became clear through media reports that the core product of the blood laboratoryCompany, a rapid blood tester that allegedly could detect 240 diseases is largely ineffective and Holmes was aware of this. Holmes' assets was 4.5 billion in 2015 dollars estimated; but rated 0 by Forbes the following year .

The US Securities and Exchange Commission accused Holmes in 2018 that their company was a large-scale fraud. As part of a settlement, Holmes reached an agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on, among other things, the payment of a fine of US $ 500,000 and the obligation not to manage a listed company for ten years. In the course of this, she transferred 18.9 million own voting shares to Theranos in order to give up control of the company. In June 2018, a grand jury indicted Holmes; the proceedings were initially scheduled for July 2021, but were only opened on September 1, 2021.

Theranos

Company logo

Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 to realize their idea of ​​a fast and cheap blood test. The company claims that it used genetic testing instead of culture media to examine the blood for bacteria and viruses . The idea behind Theranos was to offer examination methods cheaper than those of the competition and less stressful for patients. This should be made possible by a specially developed blood collection pen, which would only take a few microliters of blood and which could then be used to carry out up to 70 different tests.
In July 2011, Holmes brought former US Secretary of State George Shultz to the Theranos board of directors . Over the course of the next three years, he won over other ex-politicians and military personnel for the body, including William Perry , Henry Kissinger , Sam Nunn , Bill Frist , Gary Roughead ( former Admiral, USN ), James N. Mattis (then General, USMC ), Richard Kovacevich (former Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO) and Riley Bechtel (former CEO of the Bechtel Group ).
During the entire time Theranos was unable to bring a functioning, flawless product onto the market. The company's announcements never came true. In 2016, the American supervisory authority banned Holmes from working in or on a laboratory technology company.
Before a massive downsizing was carried out, the company had almost 800 employees at the end of 2015. In 2018, the majority of the remaining 125 employees were laid off. The blood test startup Theranos was finally closed on September 4, 2018; Most of the remaining employees below the management level had already been laid off as of August 31, 2018.

Proven ineffectiveness of the core product

Since the first doubts about the effectiveness of her Edison blood test apparatus arose in an article in the Wall Street Journal in October 2015 , several US authorities from the US Securities and Exchange Commission to the FDA have been investigating her. Those skilled in the art are particularly critical of the fact that there is an essential difference between blood from the fingertips and the veins and that this method is therefore unsuitable or unsuitable for the applications described. The Edison blood test apparatus, the size of a desktop copier, should be able to carry out around 240 different tests with the small amounts of blood. Ultimately, however, the device was only able to accurately detect herpes . The Wall Street Journal reporter revealed that the company had been secretly using Siemens analysis equipment in the background. Holmes firmly denied the fact. However, a number of company employees went public because the device kept producing false results in practice and they did not want to cover up the fraud.

On July 7, 2016, the company announced that the regulatory agency Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services  (CMS) had revoked the license to operate a blood testing laboratory in California for two years from the owners and operators of Theranos .

On March 14, 2018, the US regulator SEC filed a complaint against Holmes in a district court in the state of California. The allegation is securities fraud. Holmes knew that most of the Theranos blood tests were not analyzed by a specially developed blood analyzer, but with the help of third-party devices. Nevertheless, she gave potential investors the impression that the tests were carried out with the help of her own development and that this and other false information knowingly or grossly negligently secured investor money in the hundreds of millions. She was replaced as the boss and she was banned from running a listed company for the next ten years.

Criminal proceedings

In June 2018, Holmes and former Theranos President and CEO Ramesh Balwani were charged with fraud against investors and customers. The process was significantly delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic . In the meantime, the competent court has decided that the proceedings against Balwani will be separated and only started after the proceedings against Holmes have ended. The now set date for the trial of Holmes, which begins with the selection of the jury, was July 13, 2021. Due to Holmes' pregnancy, which had previously been kept secret, and the confinement in July 2021, the trial began on August 31, 2021 Court has expanded the alleged allegations and the sentence extends to 20 years in prison, both defendants are still at large. The trial opened in San Jose on September 1, 2021 and ended on December 17, 2021 with the pleadings of the Prosecution and Defense; the public prosecutor had called 29 witnesses, the defense only three. To everyone's surprise, Holmes finally took the stand after being silent for three months; she essentially denied all allegations. On January 3, 2022, Holmes was found guilty on four of eleven counts. The court will announce the amount of the penalty at a later date.

assets

The US business magazine Forbes estimated Holmes' fortune in 2015 at around 3.5 billion US dollars . This made her rank 360 on Forbes' 2015 list of the richest people in the world.

In June 2016, however , Forbes put the value of Theranos at $ 800 million and adjusted Holmes' estimated net worth to practically zero, as she owns 50% of the company but, unlike other investors, does not hold any preferential shares and is therefore in the In the event of the company's liquidation, it would come out empty-handed.

Similar scandals

literature

  • John Carreyrou: Bad Blood. The real story of the biggest scam in Silicon Valley. 2nd Edition. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-421-04823-3 (with notes and register).
    • American original edition: Bad Blood. Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2018, ISBN 9781524731656 .

Web links

Commons : Elizabeth Holmes  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Elizabeth Holmes. Retrieved January 4, 2022 .
  2. ↑ a b tagesschau.de: Theranos founder Holmes for fraud in court. Retrieved August 31, 2021 .
  3. ↑ tagesschau.de: Startup billionaire Holmes: From 4.5 billion to zero. Retrieved August 31, 2021 .
  4. ↑ Lydia Ramsey: SEC Charges Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes With 'Massive Fraud'. In: inc.com. March 14, 2018, accessed May 8, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Katharina Koerth: Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos: The new life of the alleged blood test fraudster. In: Spiegel Online . April 27, 2019, accessed May 8, 2020 .
  6. ↑ SEC.gov | Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged With Massive Fraud. Retrieved August 23, 2020 .
  7. ↑ a b Take the stand at your own risk. In: faz.net. Retrieved December 18, 2021 .
  8. ↑ Caitlin Roper: This Woman Invented a Way to Run 30 Lab Tests on Only One Drop of Blood. In: Wired Magazine (online). February 18, 2014, accessed October 3, 2014 .
  9. ↑ Kevin Loria: This Woman's Revolutionary Idea Made Her A Billionaire - And Could Change Medicine. In: Business Insider. September 29, 2014, accessed October 3, 2014 .
  10. ↑ The bloody career of America's youngest self-made billionaire . Manager magazine . October 22, 2014. Retrieved April 3, 2015.
  11. ↑ a b Parloff, Roger: A singular board at Theranos . In: Fortune . June 12, 2014. Retrieved May 11, 2016.
  12. ↑ Ron Leuty: Theranos adds Kovacevich to all-star board . In: San Francisco Business Times , August 2, 2013. Retrieved March 9, 2014. 
  13. ↑ Ron Leuty: Quiet Theranos adds former Wells chief Kovacevich, 'Mad Dog' Mattis to power-packed board . In: San Francisco Business Times , July 29, 2013. Retrieved March 9, 2014. 
  14. ^ Lydia Ramsey Planter: US regulators want to bar Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos for 2 years. Retrieved April 2, 2021 .
  15. ^ Reed Abelson, Andrew Pollack: Theranos Under Fire as US Threatens Crippling Sanctions . In: The New York Times . April 13, 2016, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed April 2, 2021]).
  16. ↑ Because of fraud: blood test start-up fires almost all employees. In: Spiegel Online . April 11, 2018. Retrieved June 10, 2018 .
  17. ↑ John Carreyrou: Blood-Testing Firm Theranos to dissolve . In: Wall Street Journal . September 5, 2018, ISSN  0099-9660 ( wsj.com [accessed August 24, 2020]).
  18. ↑ Fraud start-up closes. In: Tages-Anzeiger , September 5, 2018, accessed on September 6, 2018.
  19. ↑ John Carreyrou: Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood Test Technology. In: The Wall Street Journal , October 16, 2015.
  20. ↑ Alexander Demling: Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes: The deep fall of the self-made billionaire. In: Spiegel Online . April 27, 2016, accessed May 8, 2020 .
  21. ↑ Norman A. Paradis: The Rise and Fall of Theranos. In: scientificamerican.com. April 22, 2016, accessed May 8, 2020 .
  22. ↑ Theranos. (No longer available online.) In: theranos.com. Archived from the original on July 8, 2016 ; Retrieved July 8, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / theranos.com
  23. ↑ hey: Elizabeth Holmes: US Securities and Exchange Commission finds fraud in blood test startup. In: Spiegel Online . March 14, 2018, accessed May 8, 2020 .
  24. ↑ United States District Court for the Northern District of California, March 14, 2018: Securities and Exchange Commission v. Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, Inc. , accessed March 14, 2018.
  25. ↑ Elizabeth Holmes, founder of blood-testing company Theranos, indicted on wire fraud charges. In: Washington Post. June 15, 2018, accessed March 20, 2019 .
  26. ↑ Elizabeth Holmes trial pushed to August following surprise pregnancy announcement. Retrieved April 5, 2021 .
  27. ↑ Elizabeth Holmes: Fallen Founder. In: ZEIT ONLINE. August 31, 2021, accessed September 1, 2021 .
  28. ↑ US v. Elizabeth Holmes, et al. In: justice.gov. Retrieved on April 5, 2021 (as of April 5, 2021 ).
  29. ↑ Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of fraud. Spiegel Online , January 4, 2022, accessed on the same day.
  30. ↑ America's Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40: # 6 Elizabeth Holmes.
  31. ↑ Matthew Herper: From $ 4.5 Billion To Nothing: Forbes Revises Estimated Net Worth Of Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes. In: Forbes. Retrieved June 1, 2016 .
  32. ↑ nab./lid./dpa/AFP: Yesterday a billionaire - today without assets. In: FAZ.net . June 2, 2016, accessed May 8, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Holmes, Elizabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American entrepreneur and biotechnology con man
BIRTH DATE 3rd February 1984
PLACE OF BIRTH Washington, DC , United States