Tag: Elizabeth Holmes

People Magazine has a cover interview with convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes, who perpetrated one of the biggest frauds in history through her blood testing company, Theranos. Holmes is currently in a Texas federal prison, where she has served two years out of a now nine year sentence. In People, Holmes comes across as a defensive self-pitying narcissist who believes she can still revolutionize healthcare while single-handedly reforming the American criminal justice system. It’s very on-brand for her, as is a major celebrity publication giving a platform to a white woman who stole over $500 million and continues to lie about it. People has some choice quotes from Holmes along with a look at her average days in prison, which include exercising, working with inmates on their resumes and speaking to her family twice a day. Holmes claims that getting pregnant twice while awaiting trial for fraud was just her way of starting a family when she could, and that she never expected to serve time. I’m going to quote from a couple of different stories on People here.

On how hard it is to only see her children every weekend


Her young children — son William, 3, and daughter Invicta, 2 — are being raised nearby by their father, Holmes’s partner Billy Evans, 33, but visit their mother at the dormitory-style correctional facility every weekend.

“It’s been pure pain since I’ve been here,” says Holmes, who opens up about her life behind bars and being separated from her family in this week’s PEOPLE cover story. “It’s been torture.”

Why she had kids while awaiting trial


Although the start of her prison sentence was postponed, Holmes says she still wasn’t mentally prepared to serve time as a mother with two babies. She gave birth to her first child, William, just weeks before her fraud trial began. Evans, whom she met at a rooftop charity event in Oct. 2017 during the Theranos scandal, presented a silver snake ring bought at a Taylor Swift Reputation Tour concert when he proposed to her a year later.

Together they decided to start a family despite the legal jeopardy that Holmes was soon to face. “I asked him 20 times if he wanted to spend his life with me,” she recalls. “There were a million reasons why not.” (Although Evans is an heir to the Evans Hotel Group, his family hasn’t contributed to Holmes’s legal defense. )

A year later Holmes was pregnant again with daughter Invicta (Latin for “invincible”), which delayed her prison start by a month. “I always wanted to be a mother,” she explains. “I truly did not think I would ever be convicted or found guilty.”

She’s going to reform the criminal justice system


Scheduled for release on April 3, 2032, Holmes says she hopes to travel with her family and to fight for reform of criminal justice system. She recently drafted an American Freedom Act bill — a seven-page handwritten document— to bolster the presumption of innocence and change criminal procedure. “This will be my life’s work,” says Holmes, adding that she is speaking out now as part of her mission to advocate on behalf of incarcerated persons and those ripped away from their children.

She doesn’t think she did anything wrong


While she defiantly maintains her innocence, Holmes admits, “I replayed mistakes I made a million times in my mind, burning them into my body.” But when asked to specify the “mistakes” she made, Holmes declines to answer, saying only, “Theranos failed. I take responsibility for that failure. Failure is not fraud…”

And, despite her global reputation as a biotech con artist who put lives at risk, she says she’s continuing to write patents for new inventions and plans to resume her career in healthcare technology after her release. “There is not a day I have not continued to work on my research and inventions,” she says. “I remain completely committed to my dream of making affordable healthcare solutions available to everyone.”

[From two stories on People]

The Today Show has a brief interview with the People journalist who met with Holmes, Danielle Bacher. Bacher says that Holmes speaks in a normal voice now and that she won’t admit she’s done anything wrong. It sound like she’s painting herself as a victim for facing even this small sliver of a consequence. Holmes gets to see her kids and husband every weekend, she speaks to her family twice a day, she gets therapy once a week and is doing work she describes as meaningful. She’s still getting positive press and a platform for her lies too. It’s jaw-droppingly delusional and maddening, but I guess that’s just this woman’s whole personality. The minute Holmes gets out of prison in six years she’s going to start grifting again. She’ll probably be successful since she’s an expert at scamming old white Republican men.

“I refused to plead guilty to crimes I did not commit,” Holmes told People Magazine. “Theranos failed. But failure is not fraud.” https://t.co/mBMOBbqoiY

— Inc. (@Inc) February 13, 2025

I spent time in federal prison in Texas to interview Elizabeth Holmes. My exclusive cover story is on newsstands today! https://t.co/NRhrskpvtj via @people

— Danielle Bacher (@DBacherwrites) February 12, 2025

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On May 30, Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison to start serving her 11 year sentence. Even though it’s a minimum-security prison, she’ll be subjected to constant surveillance and monitoring. Which is the kind of treatment she gave her employees, as it turns out. Business Insider [via Yahoo] used this opportunity to report some details about Theranos office culture from journalist John Carrreyrou’s book Bad Blood. Carreyrou’s the one whose reporting for the Wall Street Journal blew the story wide open, and Bad Blood was published back in 2018. I’m sure it surprises no one that Elizabeth used many tactics to keep her employees working late, including ordering dinners every night that arrived after 8PM, so that employees couldn’t leave until 10 PM.

Being monitored constantly is something Elizabeth Holmes will have to get used to after finally beginning her 11-year sentence on May 30.

According to John Carreyrou’s book “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” the Theranos founder was obsessed with monitoring how many hours her employees were putting in, and would find ways to keep them working late.

One of these approaches involved getting dinner delivered to the Theranos office every night. However, Holmes timed the delivery between 8 p.m. and 8.30 p.m., meaning staff often weren’t leaving work until 10 p.m., according to the book.

Ordering communal dinners was reportedly one of several unusual tactics Holmes, who tried to model herself on Steve Jobs, would use to both inspire and intimidate Theranos employees.

According to the book, Holmes’ assistants would track the arrival and departure time of workers each day, while IT staff would monitor the software being on employees’ computers. She also had her team add employees on Facebook and tell Holmes what they were posting, Carreyrou wrote.

The surveillance state Holmes appeared to run at Theranos may not be too far removed from her new life at a federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas.

According to The Journal and an inmate handbook for the Bryan camp, she will be woken at 6 a.m. daily, and face five headcounts a day.

[From Business Insider via Yahoo]

Ah, how the turn tables. (I know that’s not the expression, but it is my favorite malapropism.) The controlling boss is now subject to even more intense surveillance than what her employees experienced. I wish I could say that Holmes’s downfall changed Silicon Valley for the better. The failures of businesses like Theranos and WeWork have definitely made investors more cautious. Then the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank changed the mood even more. I lived in the Bay Area for seven years, I saw how billions of dollars just flying around changed the whole region. It all happened so quickly that it felt surreal to be there. Now San Francisco–which used to be a vibrant, fun place–is a hollowed-out shell of itself, plagued with homelessness and drug addiction. Meanwhile, the ones who made good sit at rooftop lounges drinking $21 rosemary Palomas. It’s dystopian. But the company culture issues at Bay Area startups probably still remain. The tactics of control the article describes Elizabeth using–ordering dinners to get people to stay longer, tracking how long people are logged in, following them on social media–none of that seems that abnormal to me? I guess I’ve come to expect that level of surveillance from an employer, at least in white-collar office jobs. I’m a young-ish millennial so maybe that’s why. I’d be curious to know if any of you have experienced that kind of surveillance at a startup.

Something that does make me sad is that female founders still get a really tiny amount of venture capital funding–about two percent of VC money goes to women-owned startups as of March 2023. If they do get funding, they still have to work harder to be taken seriously or to get more money raised down the line. I think Elizabeth Holmes has made it harder for other female founders to get funding because she was such a fraud and a trickster, and we all know how primed people are to believe the worst about women. I don’t have any stats to back that up, it’s just my hunch. And it’s also even more difficult for women of color to get funding. Black-owned businesses account for two percent of all VC funding, and Black women founders get less than one percent. Anyway, I wonder what will become of Elizabeth’s hair while she’s inside. Will it return to the straw-like staticky mess of her glory days?

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