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Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes leaves after a hearing at a federal court in San Jose, California, July 17, 2019.
Stephen Lam | Reuters

Nearly a decade ago, Elizabeth Holmes was proclaimed the golden girl of Silicon Valley, and briefly crowned America’s youngest female self-made billionaire.

This week, she’ll walk into a San Jose federal courthouse with a very different image: a defendant charged accused of fraud. 

Federal prosecutors in the Northern District of California have accused Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, former Theranos president and for a time her romantic partner, of defrauding investors and patients. They each face two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 10 counts of wire fraud. Holmes and Balwani, who will be tried separately, pleaded not guilty.

Jury selection in Holmes’ trial will begin Tuesday and is expected to take at least two days, a process that typically takes less than a day in lower-profile cases. Opening statements are scheduled for Sept. 8 and the trial is expected to last 13 weeks.

If convicted, Holmes could face 20 years in prison. Prosecutors say Holmes not only swindled investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, but she also put thousands of lives at risk.

The rise and fall of Theranos

Holmes’ saga began when she had a vision of running hundreds of laboratory tests with just a finger prick of blood. She dropped out of Stanford at age 19 to start Theranos. The idea was to make blood tests cheaper, convenient and accessible to consumers.

The company struck partnerships with Walgreens and the grocery chain Safeway. Her board of directors included luminaries such as former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and the late George Shultz and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

But Holmes’ vision turned upside down in 2015 after Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published a series of damning reports exposing the shortcomings and inaccuracies of Theranos’ technology.

Patients were given inaccurate test results relating to conditions such as HIV, cancer and miscarriages.

“She commercialized a medical product that she knew did not work, her machine only did a handful of tests that did not do them well at all,” Carreyrou said in an interview with CNBC last week.

In 2018, Holmes and Balwani were charged with “massive fraud” by the Securities and Exchange Commission. That led to Theranos being dissolved and Holmes settling with the SEC. She agreed to pay $500,000 without admitting or denying the charges. Balwani intends to fight the SEC charges.

The investors

Holmes once had some of the most powerful and wealthiest venture capitalists in America behind her healthcare start-up Theranos.

Investors such as media mogul Rupert Murdoch, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Walton family of Walmart fame, the Cox family, Patriots owner Robert Kraft and Mexican investor Carlos Slim became so enchanted with her they poured millions into Theranos.

Some of those investors are expected to testify in Holmes’ trial. All of the major investors, who doled out $700 million over the course of a decade, did not respond to CNBC’s request for a comment. Prosecutors allege the investors were swayed by exaggerations and misrepresentations of the blood-testing technology.

“When a deal turns into this, you don’t want to be on that list of investors anymore,” said Kevin O’Leary, chairman of O’Shares ETFs and a judge on CNBC’s “Money Court.”

O’Leary, who said about 20% of his investments have failed, didn’t mince words when asked about the fallout from Theranos investors.

“You can understand how embarrassing it is to get a zero like that,” O’Leary said. “Clearly means you didn’t do your due diligence which all investors know is a mistake. When there’s a really hot deal, what suffers immediately is the diligence process. You’re just questioning if you can get into the deal.”

According to the indictment, prosecutors say there were six wire transfers from unnamed investors that they allege were the result of fraudulent claims about what they were getting in return.

“It’s going to be highly scrutinized and the investors will be dragged back into the press again and shamed for it,” O’Leary said. “I can guarantee you this, it will change nothing. When this is over whatever happens, it will happen again. I guarantee nothing changes in regards to investment in Silicon Valley.”

A Silicon Valley tale

Instead of being an example of Silicon Valley’s best, Theranos turned into a black eye for start-ups.

One of Holmes’ defense strategies may be to blame the so-called “fake it ’til you make it” motto of Silicon Valley. Earlier this year, the judge ruled her defense team can lean on the hype and exaggeration of start-up founders to explain Holmes’ own actions. 

“It’s going to be a wake-up call for venture capitalists and young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley,” Carreyrou said. “If you go too far, if you push the envelope and hype and exaggerate to the point of lying, it becomes securities fraud.”

However, if she’s found not guilty, some say it could encourage risk taking.

“It’s going to a take guilty verdict to course correct and even a guilty verdict in this case might not be enough,” Carreyrou said.

Mental health defense

Explosive new court documents unsealed just days before jury selection shed light on how Holmes’ lawyers might mount a mental health defense. In the filings, Holmes claims she was the victim of “a decade-long” abuse by Balwani, whom she met when she was 18.

The documents reveal she plans to claim he psychologically, emotionally and sexually abused her. According to one filing, Holmes accused Balwani of throwing sharp objects at her, controlling what she ate, when she slept, how she dressed and monitoring her calls and text messages. Balwani denied the claims.

The court filings also revealed Holmes plans to take the stand in her own defense, a move many legal experts say is a risky one.

“It’s an uphill battle: Balwani may have exercised influence on her, due to his age or prior successes,” said Danny Cevallos, an NBC News legal analyst. “But will she convince a jury that his influence excused her own conduct?”

Today, with her trial repeatedly delayed she’s now the mother of a newborn. Holmes, who once was a ubiquitous presence in the media, stays silent and ignores reporters’ questions every time she enters and exits the courthouse.

That will all change if she does indeed take the stand to finally tell her side of the story.

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Jeff Bezos sells $737 million worth of Amazon shares

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Jeff Bezos sells 7 million worth of Amazon shares

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos leaves Aman Venice hotel, on the second day of the wedding festivities of Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez, in Venice, Italy, June 27, 2025.

Yara Nardi | Reuters

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unloaded more than 3.3 million shares of his company in a sale valued at roughly $736.7 million, according to a financial filing on Tuesday.

The stock sale is part of a previously arranged trading plan adopted by Bezos in March. Under that arrangement, Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares of Amazon over a period ending May 29, 2026.

Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains chairman, has been selling stock in the company at a regular clip in recent years, though he’s still the largest individual shareholder. He adopted a similar trading plan in February 2024 to sell up to 50 million shares of Amazon stock through late January of this year.

Bezos previously said he’d sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. He’s also donated shares to Day 1 Academies, his nonprofit that’s building a chain of Montessori-inspired preschools across several states.

The most recent stock sale comes after Bezos and Lauren Sanchez tied the knot last week in a lavish wedding in Venice. The star-studded celebration, which took place over three days and sparked protests from some local residents, was estimated to cost around $50 million.

Bezos is ranked third in Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index with a net worth of about $240 billion. He’s behind Tesla CEO Elon Musk at $363 billion and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at $260 billion.

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Google promotes ‘AI Mode’ on home page ‘Doodle’

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Google promotes ‘AI Mode’ on home page 'Doodle'

Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.

Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images

The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.

Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.

The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”

Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”

AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.

“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.

AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.

In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.

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How a beer-making process is used to make cleaner disposable diapers

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How a beer-making process is used to make cleaner disposable diapers

Clean Start: Startup focuses on making diapers renewable

Disposable diapers are a massive environmental offender. Roughly 300,000 of them are sent to landfills or incinerated every minute, according to the World Economic Forum, and they take hundreds of years to decompose. It’s a $60 billion business.

One alternative approach has been compostable diapers, which can be made out of wood pulp or bamboo. But composting services aren’t universally available and some of the products are less absorbent than normal nappies, critics say.

A growing number of parents are also turning to cloth diapers, but they only make up about 20% of the U.S. market.

ZymoChem is attacking the diaper problem from a different angle. Harshal Chokhawala, CEO of ZymoChem, said that 60% to 80% of a typical diaper consists of fossil-based plastics. And half of that is an ingredient called super absorbent polymer, or SAP.

“What we have created is a low carbon footprint bio-based and biodegradable version of this super absorbent polymer,” Chokhawala said.

ZymoChem, with operations in San Leandro, California, and Burlington, Vermont, invented this new type of absorbent by using a fermentation process to convert a renewable resource — sugar — from corn into biodegradable materials. It’s similar to making beer.

“We’re at a point now where we’re very close to being at cost parity with fossil based manufacturing of super absorbents,” said Chokhawala.

The company’s drop-in absorbents can be added into other diapers, which makes it different from environmentally conscious companies like Charlie Banana, Kudos and Hiro, which sell their own brand of diapers.

ZymoChem doesn’t yet have a diaper product on the market. But Lindy Fishburne, managing partner at Breakout Ventures and an investor in the company, says it’s a scalable model.

“Being able to build and grow with biology allows us to unlock a circular economy and a supply chain that is no longer petro-derived, which opens up the opportunities of where you can manufacture and how you secure supply chains,” Fishburne said.

Other investors include Toyota Ventures, GS Futures, KDT Ventures, Cavallo Ventures and Lululemon.  The company has raised a total of $35 million.

The Lululemon partnership shows that it’s not just about diapers. ZymoChem’s bio-based materials can also be used in other hygiene products and in bio-based nylon. Lululemon recently said it will use it in some of its leggings, which were traditionally made with petroleum.

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