Silicon Valley biotech star Elizabeth Holmes who defrauded investors in her blood-testing startup Theranos on Monday (January 3) was convicted after jurors found Holmes guilty of four counts of tricking investors and now faces the possibility of spending years behind bars.
Holmes had claimed that she had developed a revolutionary testing system and had vowed to revolutionize diagnostics with self-service machines that could run an array of tests on just drops of blood, a vision that drew high-profile backers and made her a billionaire by the age of 30.
Elizabeth Holmes was called the next young tech visionary and braced numerous magazine covers which allowed her to get investors’ cash. However, it all fell apart when Wall Street Journal reported that the machines didn’t work as promised.
Prosecutors spent 11 weeks presenting over two dozen witnesses and made an exhaustive argument that Holmes knew her technology did not work as promised and took steps to mislead investors and patients.
She had also put logos of pharma giants Pfizer and Schering-Plough onto Theranos without permission and one of the most important arguments made by the prosecution was that she deliberately tried to inflate Theranos’s credibility in order to win backers.
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