Elizabeth Holmes: How Theranos founder went from billionaire darling of Silicon Valley to behind bars

Published

3 years ago

November 19, 2022

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“Don’t worry about the future, we’re in good hands.”

So said former US president Bill Clinton in 2015, as he introduced Elizabeth Holmes to an adoring New York crowd.

It seemed an uncontroversial statement at the time, as he hailed the achievements of a woman who had become America’s youngest self-made female billionaire after taking Silicon Valley by storm.

A hub for the world’s biggest tech companies, the only thing more synonymous with this infamous stretch of northern California than scientific breakthroughs and innovative gadgets were the rich white men who were invariably behind them – turtleneck jumpers and smart trouser-sneaker combos in tow.

Holmes – a high school computer whizz turned Stanford dropout – was a bona fide gatecrasher, her stunning rise to the cover of Forbes magazine powered by her founding health technology firm Theranos and its rapid ascent to a peak valuation of $9bn. Look back on what it was promising to deliver, and it’s easy to see why.

Revolutionary blood tests were at the heart of its pitch, ones which could be performed at phenomenal speed with merely a small drop required – and no needles.

Holmes’s catchphrase became “change the world”, such were her assertions that the equipment her company had developed could test for dozens of diseases in one fell swoop.

She insisted it would change healthcare in the US, not just by speeding up and streamlining trips to the doctor, but by eventually rendering such visits obsolete by selling the gizmos in stores.

It took more than a decade for such claims to be exposed as the stuff of science-fiction, but Holmes’s shameless willingness to talk the talk regardless helped her become one of the darlings of Silicon Valley, raising hundreds of millions from investors and venture capitalists.

As Theranos grew, her public image was crafted to perfection to make her the perfect face of one of America’s most exciting companies, famously adopting the aforementioned turtlenecks from her idol Steve Jobs, the late Apple founder, and speaking in a strikingly deep voice which added extra gravitas to her every word.

Fame isn’t for everyone, but for Holmes it seemed elementary.

Nothing, it seemed, could go wrong. Until it did. Big time.

How the lie was exposed

Holmes’s empire began to unravel upon the publication of a bombshell expose by The Wall Street Journal, which reported that Theranos’s technology was profoundly flawed.

The devices used to collect people’s blood, which the firm dubbed “nanotainers”, were said to be so far off the mark that Theranos had in fact been using other companies’ equipment to carry out blood tests in its laboratories.

The most distressing piece of the Journal’s report was that the company’s ex-chief scientist, Briton Ian Gibbons, had tried to take his own life after telling his wife the tech did not work. He died shortly after from liver failure.

The stories emerged just a month after Holmes had shared the stage with Bill Clinton.

As described by Sky’s Ian King when Theranos went bust in 2018, three years after the Journal’s report, key to the company keeping the wool fixed firmly over the public’s eyes until then had been an almost cult-like culture among its executives and staff, and one of extreme secrecy.

Neither are unique to Silicon Valley – some of the big tech personalties who have emerged over the years remain an odd focus of worship in some corners of the internet – but rarely have they combined to such destructive effect.

The journalist who broke the story, John Carreyrou, has since written a book on the scandal called Bad Blood, which stands to be turned into a feature film. There’s perhaps a cruel irony that it’s being produced by Apple, the company whose late co-founder was a source of such inspiration for Holmes.

Her rise and fall also inspired a hit podcast series called The Dropout, and a subsequent Hulu series of the same name starring Amanda Seyfried.

The show presents Holmes as a brave, smart, single-minded young woman determined to succeed, and she is initially easy to root for. As Apple designer Ana Arriola tells Holmes in a scene when she attempts to recruit her following the launch of the first iPhone: “Honestly, it’s just really exciting to me that you’re a young female CEO, instead of a cocky little boy in a sweatshirt.”

But Holmes’s goal of becoming a wealthy star of the biotech scene quickly overcomes all other instincts – including a willingness to tell the truth.

It’s a trait that left some staff feeling deeply uneasy, not just Gibbons and Arriola, who describes her time at Theranos on her LinkedIn page as “altruism through corrupt unethical science-fiction”.

How a life unravelled

Carreyrou’s revelations, which Holmes has admitted trying to silence, sparked investigations by medical and financial regulators in the US. In a development which would once have been unthinkable, the now 34-year-old was facing criminal charges in 2018.

She and the president of Theranos, ex-lover Romesh Balwani (who she has since accused of sexual assault), were accused of engaging “in a multi-million-dollar scheme to defraud investors, a separate scheme to defraud doctors and patients”, and each faced two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud.

Among those defrauded investors were the likes of Rupert Murdoch and the American pharmacy giant Walgreens, while similarly big names had been attracted to Theranos’s board of directors.

Among them were former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, and an ex-director of the US Centers for Disease Control.

All of them had been hoodwinked by Holmes, who had founded Theranos aged just 18 and quickly learned how to tell her backers exactly what they wanted – and she needed them – to hear.

As Eric Jackson, a startup founder and author of The PayPal Wars, put it to Sky News: “There is almost endemic to the system a need to, I don’t want to say exaggerate, but to tell a narrative that’s compelling to investors. At a certain point hype does have to be in line with credibility, if not you’re in an instance of good old-fashioned fraud.”

Whether it was a matter of delusion, falling victim to the treacherous “fake it ’til you make it” culture that permeates American startups, or something more sinister, Holmes maintained during her trial that she initially believed her company’s purportedly revolutionary blood tests were real.

“I wanted to convey the impact the company could make for people and for health care,” she told the court of her meetings with investors.

To prosecutors, such assertions were the consequence of a woman who was “out of time and out of money”.

Having launched her company by repurposing family funds meant for her Harvard degree, taking it mainstream meant doing whatever it took to attract her big time investors and venture capitalists.

The once-enamoured former US secretary of defence Jim Mattis, who joined the company board, told the trial: “There just came a point when I didn’t know what to believe about Theranos any more.”

‘She chose lies when we needed truth’

Holmes’s sentencing on Friday to more than 11 years in prison comes after she was convicted of fraud earlier this year, her years-long scam having failed to move the jury as it had done her backers.

After a case which gripped the world, just as her rise to fame had done, US federal prosecutors had asked the judge to jail her for 15 years, a term considered appropriate for “one of the most substantial white collar offences Silicon Valley or any other district has seen”.

Balwani has been left waiting until next month for his sentencing, having also been convicted of multiple fraud counts during a separate trial.

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In a 46-page brief last week, assistant US attorney Robert S Leach wrote of Holmes: “She repeatedly chose lies, hype, and the prospect of billions of dollars over patient safety and fair dealing with investors.

“Elizabeth Holmes’ crimes were not failing, they were lying – lying in the most serious context, where everyone needed her to tell the truth.”

A counter document from Holmes’s attorneys, totalling 82 pages, insisted her reputation had been permanently and unfairly destroyed, given it had turned her into a “caricature to be mocked and vilified”.

They appealed for a sentence of no more than 18 months.

More than 130 friends, family, former investors and employees have also submitted letters to the judge, Edward Davila of San Jose, California, to appeal for leniency.

Senator Cory Booker used his to hail Holmes, still only 38, as someone who “can, despite mistakes, make the world a better place”.

Whether that’s true or not, she won’t be able to from behind bars.

US

Matthew Perry and the Hollywood drug network exposed by his death

Published

3 hours ago

September 2, 2025

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Matthew Perry and the Hollywood drug network exposed by his death

Before he died alone in his jacuzzi, Matthew Perry had received three injections of ketamine in the space of just six hours. “Shoot me up with a big one,” he told his personal assistant, ahead of the final, fatal dose.

According to court documents, in the period leading up to 28 October 2023, Kenneth Iwamasa was illegally administering Perry with between six and eight shots of the drug, an anaesthetic that can have hallucinogenic effects, each day.

A live-in assistant, he admitted to finding the actor unconscious at his Pacific Palisades home on at least two occasions in the weeks prior.

The hit that ultimately killed the Friends star was supplied by Jasveen Sangha, also known as the “Ketamine Queen” – a dealer who apparently only dealt “with high-end and celebs”. She has agreed to plead guilty to five charges and will appear in court later today.

Her charges, along with others filed against Iwamasa and others over the supply of ketamine to Perry, exposed part of Hollywood’s underground drug network – and put the spotlight on the world of celebrity, money and power.

‘Yes men’ with terrible consequences

Perry’s death was met with both utter shock and a sad sense of the inevitable. The world knew him best as Chandler Bing, the comic heartbeat of Friends. But behind the jokes and the sarcasm, he was deeply troubled.

“It almost felt like we’d been mourning Matthew for a long time because his battle with that disease was a really hard one for him to fight,” is how his former co-star Jennifer Aniston described his addiction in a recent interview. “As hard as it was for all of us and for the fans, there’s a part of me that thinks this is better… I’m glad he’s out of that pain.”

The actor was an addict, and vulnerable – but also a huge star, worth millions.

Iwamasa was administering the injections, ultimately playing God – but to him, the power most likely lay with his famous boss. His actions may seem inexcusable, but did he feel he had a choice?

“I think it was a situation that increasingly got more and more out of control,” says Bonnie Low-Kramen, a former celebrity assistant turned trainer, and author of Be The Ultimate Assistant.

Those who do the job, especially in Los Angeles, can be put under an enormous amount of pressure, she says, “tasked with doing things many of us wouldn’t imagine carrying out for our employers. It is a job which comes with an inherent power imbalance”.

Which means it can be incredibly hard to say no.

“When people are rich and famous, they often have people around them who won’t say no,” she says. “And assistants are in the yes business anyway.

“We’re in the business of figuring out, ‘well, let’s solve the problem…’. When money is no object, there are new rules that apply in that situation and that can be really hard to handle.”

Iwamasa is not the first celebrity assistant asked to administer or pick up illegal drugs, she says, and Perry is not the first star to die after taking drugs.

Ms Low-Kramen highlights the deaths of Janis Joplin, Prince and John Belushi as just a few other examples.

“Unfortunately, there are so many examples of this tragic end, where the abuse of drugs gets to a point where they’ve handled it for a really long time, and then the day comes when it can’t be handled anymore.”

For those struggling with addiction, being surrounded by “yes men” can have terrible consequences, says Garrett Braukman, an addiction treatment executive in Hollywood.

“Treatment is difficult for people when they have yes men. They have a lot of people that are going to tell them you can get whatever you want, you can get drugs, you can get alcohol, you could do whatever, and no one is willing to really look at that from the perspective of how dangerous that is.”

Mr Braukman says addiction can go hand in hand with fame and that a “high” percentage of his patients work in the entertainment industry.

“I don’t know how I would be able to stay clean and sober if I go to my grandma’s house and there’s 20 guys outside of my grandma’s house taking pictures of me walking in. You become an animal to a degree that people are watching.”

Rise in use of ketamine

The use of ketamine recreationally has been on the rise in recent years, in the UK as well as the US. In England, some 3,609 people started treatment for problems with the drug in the year 2023-2024 – more than eight times the number in 2014-2015, when 426 sought help, according to government statistics.

In January, drag queen The Vivienne was found dead in the bath at their home in Cheshire, aged 32. The star’s family later told how the performer had died “from the effects of ketamine use causing a cardiac arrest”.

Ketamine is usually taken recreationally as a crushed powder, but also sometimes injected or swallowed – making people feel detached and dreamlike. It can also cause severe bladder and kidney problems.

Perry’s struggles with alcohol and other drugs, before ketamine, were long running and well documented, starting with drinking as a teenager before moving on to painkilling prescription drugs Vicodin and OxyContin, and tranquilliser Xanax.

“I have spent upward of $7m (£5.8m) trying to get sober,” he wrote in his memoir, released when he was clean, just a year before his death.

While accepting the almost unsurpassable legacy of the hit show that made him a star, he said he hoped his support for fellow addicts would be the achievement he was best remembered for.

“When I die, I don’t want Friends to be the first thing that’s mentioned – I want helping others to be the first thing that’s mentioned and I’m going to live the rest of my life proving that.”

He only lived for another year.

Illegal use v therapy

Before he died, Perry had been undergoing legal ketamine infusion therapy to treat depression and anxiety. The drug can be used as a treatment in clinical settings in the US, and some specialist and private centres in the UK – although there are concerns from some medics here about its use even in those settings.

According to a postmortem report, the actor had reportedly been clean for 19 months before he started obtaining the drug illegally as well.

It was not the supervised doses that killed him, but the idea of an addict taking the drug to help their problems might still sound shocking.

In California, ketamine drips are legally used as pain relief, to treat mood disorders and to help with addiction. Other celebrities and notable figures – including Chrissy Teigen, Elon Musk and Sharon Osbourne – have all shared details of ketamine therapy and how it helped them.

Dr Austin Harris, owner and medical director at NeuroRelief Ketamine Infusion Therapy, says historically the drug is “extremely safe” when used in the right conditions, and swears by its effectiveness.

At the clinic in California, he explained to Sky News how it can help people with mood disorders and chronic pain, as well as those in recovery from drug or alcohol abuse.

“Which a lot of people who don’t really understand this at a scientific level might think is an oxymoron,” he says. “But actually, it’s profoundly beneficial – done properly – in resetting both neurologic and psychological patterns for substance abuse.”

Ketamine infusion “restarts in our brain what should already be there”, he says, in terms of “the neurologic road workers, to be able to then direct, to build new patterns and actual new nerve pathways”.

One patient having therapy at the clinic also spoke to us, saying he had abused alcohol and marijuana, and occasionally opiate painkillers, for many years.

“I’ve had enough experience and decades of being addicted to drugs and alcohol and traumas and trying different things,” he said. “When I came out of that infusion I was like, wait a minute. I didn’t have the shakes. I didn’t have the cravings.”

Dr Harris emphasises the need for administration by a professional in a clinical setting. “Matthew Perry was being illegally sold ketamine on the black market. The fact that a doctor happened to be one of several people that was illegally selling it to him should not be confused with the appropriate legal utilisation of ketamine.”

The actor was vulnerable, Dr Harris continues. “It’s absolutely abominable… You have someone with serious addiction problems, lifelong. And sadly, I think that he was really taken advantage of.”

The drugs stash

As well as Sangha and Iwamasa, the others charged over Perry’s death are Erik Fleming, an associate of Perry’s who was in contact with Sangha, Dr Mark Chavez, a physician, and Dr Salvador Plasencia, who also supplied ketamine illegally to Perry.

“I wonder how much this moron will pay,” Dr Plasencia said in a text exchange between him and Chavez.

After Perry died, Sangha desperately sought to cover her involvement. “Delete all our messages,” she instructed Fleming in a message on Signal.

In March 2024, law enforcement searched Sangha’s home and found 1.7kg of pressed pills containing methamphetamine, 79 vials of liquid ketamine, MDMA (ecstasy) tablets, counterfeit Xanax pills, baggies containing powdered ketamine and cocaine, and other drug-trafficking items such as a gold money counting machine, a scale, a wireless signal and hidden camera detector, drug packaging materials, and $5,723 in cash, according to her plea agreement.

Sangha was happy to supply to Hollywood’s rich and famous – and not an anomaly.

Several books have been written by Tinseltown dealers, and only a few months ago, the Sean “Diddy” Combs trial heard from a former personal assistant to the hip-hop mogul who testified about meeting sellers for his boss.

Now, as she becomes the last defendant to admit her role in Perry’s death, the Ketamine Queen’s guilty plea brings to a close the criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the tragedy.

But in a world where money talks, where fame and addiction or mental health issues often go hand-in-hand, it is unlikely to be the last.

US

Cardi B cleared of assaulting security guard

Published

3 hours ago

September 2, 2025

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Cardi B cleared of assaulting security guard

Cardi B has been cleared of assault by a California jury in a civil trial brought by a former security guard.

The $24m (£17.9m) case was brought over an encounter outside an obstetrician’s office in Beverly Hills in 2018.

Emani Ellis alleged the rapper cut her cheek with a fingernail and spat on her.

Cardi B, real name Belcalis Marlenis Almanzar, testified earlier on Wednesday that while an argument between her and Ms Ellis became aggressive, she didn’t touch the security guard.

The Bodak Yellow rapper told the court she had been visiting Los Angeles for promotional work in February 2018, around that year’s NBA All-Star Game.

She said she was four months into her pregnancy with the first of her three children with rapper Offset, and had not publicly shared news of her pregnancy

After attending an appointment at the obstetrician’s office – which had been closed to other patients on a Saturday for her privacy – she said Ms Ellis followed her to her fifth-floor appointment.

Cardi then told the court she heard Ms Ellis say her name into a phone and appeared to be filming her, fearing Ms Ellis would out the fact that she was pregnant.

“I told her, ‘Why are you recording?'” she testified, “and she said, ‘Oh my bad.’ She practically apologised.'”

As an argument broke out, Cardi said “she’s walking into me” and testified that Ms Ellis was bigger than her,

“She is like, security-heavy,” she added. “She just looks a little, like she could protect the building.”

Ms Ellis testified earlier in the trial that the incident left her humiliated and traumatised, and the scar on her face required cosmetic surgery.

The former security guard, who lost her job over the incident, was seeking damages that include medical expenses, compensation for emotional and physical suffering, and lost wages, along with punitive damages.

US

Google ordered to make search engine changes – but avoids dramatic break-up

Published

5 hours ago

September 2, 2025

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A US federal judge has ordered a major makeover of Google’s search engine in a crackdown aimed at addressing the damaging effects of monopolistic practices.

In an effort to curb Google’s influence, Washington DC Judge Amit Mehta has introduced new limitations on how the company directs traffic to its search engine.

He is requiring the tech giant to grant current and potential competitors access to key elements of its search engine, including the vast data collected from trillions of queries that enhance the quality of its results.

However, the judge rejected the government’s more ambitious bid to split up the company, and its attempt to compel the firm to sell its widely used Chrome web browser.

And it won’t have to sell mobile operating system Android.

He also stopped short of banning the multibillion-dollar deals that Google has been making for years to lock in its search engine as the default on smartphones, personal computers, and other devices.

Those deals, involving payments of more than $26bn (£19.4bn) annually, were central to a nearly five-year-old antitrust case brought by the US Justice Department.

The 226-page ruling by US District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington DC is still expected to have far-reaching effects on the tech industry, which is being transformed by advances in artificial intelligence.

Platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are challenging Google‘s dominant role as the internet’s main gateway.