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(Trends Wide) — Elizabeth Holmes will enter prison on Tuesday, thus culminating the fall from grace of the founder of the failed blood analysis company Theranos.
Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison last November, having been convicted months earlier of multiple counts of defrauding investors while running the defunct company.
Earlier this month, an appeals court denied his request to remain free on bail while he fights to have his conviction overturned. Judge Edward Davila, who presided over the trial, ordered Holmes to turn himself in to the Bureau of Prisons by May 30 to begin serving his sentence.
Holmes is expected to serve his sentence at Bryan Federal Prison in South Texas, a minimum-security federal prison about 100 miles from Houston, where he grew up before moving to California to study at Stanford.
Her ex-boyfriend and former Theranos chief operating officer, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, was also convicted of fraud and booked into California prison last month to begin serving his sentence.
Holmes was once an icon of the world of technology, an example of the limitless ambitions and potential of Silicon Valley. Now she and Balwani are the few tech executives tried and convicted of fraud.
Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 to pursue Theranos full-time, a start-up that claimed to have invented technology that could accurately detect a range of conditions with just a few drops of blood. Theranos raised $945 million from an impressive list of investors and was worth about $9 billion at its peak, making Holmes a real billionaire. She graced magazine covers and delivered public speeches wearing a black turtleneck that invited comparisons to the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
His company began to unravel after a 2015 Wall Street Journal investigation reported that Theranos had only performed about a dozen of the hundreds of tests it offered using its proprietary technology, and with questionable accuracy. It also came to light that Theranos relied on devices made by third parties from traditional blood testing companies rather than its own technology.
Theranos ended up dissolving in September 2018.
Holmes and Balwani were first indicted together nearly five years ago on the same 12 criminal charges. Her trials were separated after Holmes indicated that he intended to accuse Balwani of sexually, emotionally and psychologically abusing her throughout their decade-long relationship, which coincided with her time running the company. (Balwani’s lawyers have denied her claims.)
This month, Davila ordered Holmes and Balwani to pay compensation of about $452 million to the victims of their crimes.
Before her sentence was announced in November, a tearful Holmes spoke in court in San Jose, California.
“I loved Theranos. It was my life’s work,” he said. “The people I tried to involve in Theranos were the ones I loved and respected the most. I am devastated by my failures.”
He then apologized to Theranos employees, investors and patients.
“I’m terribly sorry. I gave everything I had to build our company and save it,” he said. “I regret my failures with every cell in my body.”
