Elizabeth A. Holmes | Image source: Photograph by Stuart Isett/Fortune Global Forum
Editor's Note
After a four-month trial in the case of Holmes, the founder of the legendary Silicon Valley company "Blood Cancer Test", the jury finally unanimously agreed to four of the 11 charges. Under the hot sale of the best-selling book "Bad Blood", the "business deception" of the "female version of Jobs" is almost well known, but for all the viewers, the most appropriate sentence that can define Holmes is perhaps the only sentence: "Everyone tries to understand her, but no one can really understand her."
What's even more absurd is that even today, Holmes's label is constantly updated: "New Mom", "Campus Sexual Assault Victim", "Sven Gurry Defender", "Internet Celebrity"...
Written by | Sun Ruichen
Editor-in-charge | Liu Chu
● ● ●
sequence
On January 3, 2022, local time, after three weeks of deliberations, the jury in the case of United States v. Elizabeth A. Holmes, et al., concluded the withdrawal deliberations, and the court officially announced the verdict [1]. Defendant Elizabeth A. Holmes (hereinafter referred to as Holmes) was convicted of four counts related to investor fraud, four counts were not convicted of defrauding patients and consumers, and three other charges were mistrial due to the inability of a jury to reach an agreement, which may trigger the process of reiterating these three allegations.
Holmes was charged by the U.S. government with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud in 2018[2], and the case was heard in public in federal court in San Jose, California, from August to December 2021.
Each of the four counts already convicted could result in Up to 20 years in prison for Holmes. It is reported that the judge will announce the sentencing results at a later date.
Elizabeth Holmes with Theranos Company
Holmes was born in 1984 to a middle-class family in Washington, D.C., usa. Her father's family had been prominent in the 19th century, a family of commerce and medicine, but the wealth accumulated by her ancestors was squandered by her descendants in the mid-twentieth century, leaving little left. Holmes's father was heartbroken by this family history. So he has been educating his daughter to pursue a meaningful life [3].
Holmes himself also had a strong self-motivation, and he achieved excellent results in middle school, and was admitted to Stanford University in 2002 when he graduated from high school, and received the school's Presidential Scholar Scholarship .[3] In the summer of 2003, Holmes, a freshman, was offered an internship at the Singapore Institute of Genetics and participated in a summer research project to test the SARS-CoV-1 virus (SARS virus) in blood samples from patients [3]. Inspired by this internship, Holmes decided to start a business after returning to the United States and founded Theranos in Silicon Valley in the fall of 2003 [4]. Holmes was only 19 years old, and in the spring of 2004, Holmes, who was about to finish his sophomore year, decided to drop out of school and run the company full-time.
In the 16 years from the founding of Theranos in 2003 to its closure in 2018, Holmes, who owns 50 percent of the company, was once regarded as Silicon Valley's most promising entrepreneur at its peak, with a paper value of more than $4.5 billion. Holmes admired former Apple CEO Steve Jobs and emulated his style of dress. During Theranos' most high-profile days, Holmes, dressed in black turtlenecks, with red lips and blonde hair, was often seen in major magazines and television interviews.
Figure 1 Holmes dressed up with her signature black turtleneck sweater | The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, HBO
Theranos was founded in 2003, but it wasn't until 2013 that it entered the mainstream public eye. For the decade from 2003 to 2013, Theranos was in "stealth mode." In recent years, this model has become very popular among Silicon Valley startups, especially tech companies. The "stealth model" can better protect the company's entrepreneurial ideas and immature core technologies, and also avoid the company's premature attention and intervention from the public and regulatory authorities.
During "stealth mode," Theranos' early technology route changed several times. In 2004, Holmes took a 26-page document to a number of venture capitalists to raise funds. In that document, she mentioned TheraPatch [3], the first product Theranos was working on. TheraPatch is a sticky skin patch with microneedles that provides painless blood withdrawal from the subcutaneous area and extends the drug to the subcutaneous sustained release. This was a sci-fi level technology that was extremely difficult to implement under the conditions of the time. Eventually, early employees of Theranos' R&D department persuaded Holmes to abandon TheraPatch's product ideas.
Influenced by the blood glucose detectors on the market at the time, Holmes came up with a second product idea: a small handheld blood test device that could detect multiple indicators. In Holmes's vision, in the future, every patient will have such an instrument in his home: the patient can test various blood indicators at home; the instrument can be connected to the Internet and send all the results to the doctor in time. Among these figurative details, Holmes is particularly obsessed with the fact that each patient will need to provide no more than one drop of blood for future blood tests using the instrument [3]. According to Holmes herself, who has since repeated several times on different occasions, she has been afraid of needles for blood draws since she was a child, and hopes to turn the tests that require intravenous blood sampling into simpler fingertip blood tests.
With this "vision," Holmes led (and spurred) her team to work day and night. In 2005, Theranos' first instrument with a similar appearance was born. This blood detector is called Theranos 1.0.
Early in its inception, Therano s1.0 had many problems. For the next two years, Theranos' R&D department has been trying to solve these problems, but each time a parameter or design detail is changed, new problems arise in other parts of the instrument. The main reason for this "engineering dead end" is that Holmes cannot waver, but in fact cannot coexist: 1) the size of the instrument is small enough to be handheld; and 2) the volume of blood used for testing cannot be more than a drop (about 10 microliters). The technical leader in charge of the project tried to persuade Holmes to drop one of the two demands, but it was unsuccessful. [3]
Instead of giving up, Holmes began to perform "in-kind" in talks with investors and potential partners –she repeatedly and spared no effort to promote some of the advantages of her products that she imagined but did not exist [3]. Holmes himself probably did not expect that the "technology" that can detect hundreds of health indicators with just one drop of blood has great potential commercial value. Many investors believe that this technology, if it exists, promises to be the key to disrupting the existing healthcare system.
Someone else's trademark
Holmes' original vision for the future commercialization of Theranos was to work with large pharmaceutical companies. In 2007, Holmes successfully negotiated a pilot study with Pfizer, a well-known pharmaceutical company [3,5]. Pfizer is willing to try Theranos' detection instruments in a clinical trial of a drug that is being conducted in Tennessee for patients with advanced cancer. So Holmes flew to Tennessee with a semi-finished prototype machine for Theranos 1.0, which could only do simple testing projects, to collect and test blood samples from two patients. But after that, the pilot study came to an abrupt halt — for unknown reasons.
The Theranos 1.0 development team was slow to progress, and Holmes was often annoyed by this. So she set up another team within the company to conduct parallel research and development. In September 2007, the small team created a prototype different from Theranos 1.0 (Theranos' third since its founding) by combining commercially available automation goods (key components purchased from a company called Fisnar), which Holmes named Edison. Compared to Theranos 1.0, the Edison is more reliable (e.g., less likely to be completely inoperable) and simpler to operate. [3]
Edison is still far from a mature medical instrument, such as a large number of measurement errors in samples of the same patient, but Holmes is eager to share this new prototype with investors [3,5]. Not only that, she also deliberately recruited a number of designers from Apple to design the appearance of Edison. In Holmes's eyes, it doesn't seem important whether the instrument can accurately measure blood samples, what matters is that it looks high-end and atmospheric.
After the birth of the Edison instrument, Holmes re-contacted several pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, hoping that the other party would use Edison for blood testing. Three companies, Pfizer, BMS and Schering-Paula, were interested, but when Holmes's team sent the internal report of the company's instrument to each other, each company tested the instrument and made a decision not to cooperate with Theranos.
At the recent public trial of Holmes' case, researchers who had internally evaluated the instrument at Pfizer testified that after carefully evaluating Theranos' instrument that year, he found that there were many technical problems with the instrument, so Pfizer decided not to cooperate with Theranos[5].
However, the negative feedback from three companies, including Pfizer, to Theranos did not stop Holmes from moving forward. Instead, Holmes added the Pfizer trademark to the top left corner of the documents she had previously sent to Pfizer, and similarly, she made changes to the documents sent to the other two companies. Such a modification would give the impression that the documents were official documents approved and confirmed by the three companies, rather than the Theranos' self-aggrandizement.
Since 2009, Pfizer and three other companies have not had any cooperation projects or cooperative relationships with Theranos. But also since 2009, Holmes has repeatedly sent the three documents bearing the counterfeit trademarks of pharmaceutical companies to investors and business partners. At the recent trial, several investors, as witnesses, said that when they first saw the documents, they thought that Pfizer and other companies had already tested Theranos' technology, and therefore decided to invest in Theranos (the investment amount ranged from one million to one hundred million US dollars) [6].
When prosecutors asked Holmes in court whether he had trademarked Pfizer and other companies without permission on documents sent to investors, Holmes flashed: "I wish I had done things differently." ” [6]
Figure 2 Holmes added Pfizer's trademark in the upper left corner of the company's internal documents without authorization| Source: ft.com
A military project that is not imaginary
Although the documents with forged trademarks have not yet been debunked, after Pfizer, BMS, and Schering-Baoya terminated their intention to cooperate, Theranos' cooperation with major pharmaceutical companies could not continue. To continue to tell good stories to investors, Holmes needs to find new business directions for the company.
In July 2011, Holmes was introduced to former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz. Schultz admired Holmes and introduced her to many dignitaries he knew—including former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Jim Mattis, the 26th U.S. Secretary of Defense. Under Schultz's endorsement, many political celebrities also became supporters and investors of Theranos, and some even joined the board of directors of Theranos.
Holmes pitched Theranos' grand vision to the political celebrities, highlighting the potential military applications of his technology — a U.S. soldier who, after being injured, only needs to provide a small blood sample to give the military doctors access to the injured soldier's critical health information (including DNA sequence, poisoning, and other indicators) within minutes. This sounds beautiful, but it is another false information made up by Holmes.
Holmes used this beautiful "vision" to successfully confuse some of the military top brass and was able to advance cooperation, but all her attempts were stopped in the preparatory stage of implementation. That's because, according to regulations, the U.S. military currently only procures and uses drugs and medical devices approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The military counterparts with Holmes repeatedly urged Holmes to provide fda approval, but Holmes was unable to provide [7]. To this end, Holmes also tried to complain to the military top brass who were friendly to her about these subordinates who "created obstacles" for her. But the U.S. military has strict procurement rules within it, and it will not be easy for a startup to change, so Holmes failed to move forward with the project as desired. Prosecutors recently disclosed at trial that Holmes admitted in his confession in the case that Theranos had never applied its technology or products to any military occasions [7].
Projects with the military failed to take place, but Holmes pretended to be mysterious in several meetings with investors and in interviews with the media, revealing in a half-explicit and half-suggestive manner that the company was working in top-secret collaboration with the military [6].
Projects related to the U.S. military are often considered reliable, bulky, and long-term contracts. By emphasizing the company's close cooperation with the military, Holmes has fooled a number of "stupid people" investors, including former US Secretary of State Schultz and Kissinger. According to media reports, Kissinger's lawyers also introduced other clients of his own, such as the Wharton Family Foundation, which owns Walmart, to Holmes, which became the investor in the largest single investment in Theranos [6].
Figure 3 shows the | of political celebrities on the platforms of Holmes and Theranos, some of whom served on the Board of Directors of Theranos Corporation Image source: twitter.com
Third-party instruments that are concealed
In addition to the fictitious military project, Holmes also operated another project in parallel during the same period. Since 2009, Holmes has planned to put his future detection technology into seemingly perfect retail application scenarios - when consumers visit the supermarket, they can first prick a finger to test a blood, and when they finish shopping at the supermarket, they can get their own health reports. As a result, she began to conduct business contacts with a number of national chains of pharmacies and supermarkets in the United States, including the American supermarket chain Safeway, the American chain walgreens and CVS.
Theranos' contacts and negotiations with these chain giants lasted for at least three years. It wasn't until 2012 that the Sivway supermarket chain publicly announced that they had signed a partnership agreement with Theranos and invested $350 million to renovate 800 Sifwe's retail stores to establish dedicated Theranos blood testing points in stores [5]. By September 2013, Holmes decided to get Theranos to lift the "invisibility mode," and she herself began to appear frequently in the media and in the public.
She announced to the media that Theranos has signed a multi-year contract with Walgreens, a chain of pharmacies with 9,000 stores in the United States. Under the contract, Walgreens will pay $140 million to Theranos, which will open specialized blood testing points at Walgreens' retail pharmacies across the United States.
Figure 4 Theranos in a Walgreens pharmacy specializes in blood testing points | Image credit: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr
In stark contrast to the massive retail store partnership in full swing is Theranos' unsatisfactory technology. In 2013, the Edison instrument has been around for six years and has undergone some technical iterations. However, on the eve of the official launch of the cooperative project with Walgreens Pharmacy, the blood test results obtained with the Edison instrument still often have very large errors - even the Edison instrument can frequently detect high concentrations of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in female serum samples. This is a protein found primarily in male serum samples and is an important test for early screening of prostate cancer in men [8].
The director of Theranos' clinical laboratory at the time was apprehensive about the results of the Edison instrument. He repeatedly asked Holmes for advice, hoping that she would postpone the launch of the project [6, 7]. But Holmes ignored this and insisted on going live as scheduled. One reason Holmes was "confident" was that not long ago, she secretly launched a small-scale project called ADVIA within the company to test blood samples sent to Theranos using an FDA-certified blood test from Siemens.
In this way, Holmes used other people's technology, while advertising and communicating with partners, claimed that all blood samples sent to Theranos were tested using Theranos' own technology. Not only that, she also claimed that the Edison instrument can do more than 1,000 different tests. In the recent trial, prosecutors announced only 12 actual tests of Theranos technology [6, 7].
During the trial, several representatives of investors, partners, and the military who testified in court said that if they had known that Theranos' technology could only accomplish very few testing projects and used a large number of commercial instruments provided by third parties to assist in testing, they would not have considered investing in or cooperating with Theranos from the beginning [6,7].
At a recent trial, Holmes's team gave a bizarre explanation for the claim that "the modification and use of instruments provided by third parties to complete testing on instruments that should have been designed exclusively by Therano" was that this was their "trade secrets" [6,7].
According to testimony provided by the prosecution by internal employees, Theranos did buy Siemens' instruments and modify them—Siemens' instruments were originally designed for sample sizes of blood drawn from intravenous draws, so Theranos' team made some small changes to Siemens' instruments so that they could be measured with small blood volumes (but the measurements were so inaccurate that they were comparable to Theranos' disappointing Edison instruments). In response, Holmes's defense lawyer said that the modification and use of Siemens' instruments is a trade secret of the company and cannot be leaked to unrelated people at will. Even, in order to support their defense arguments, on the eve of the collapse of Theranos, the legal team patented these small changes.
This statement is not only unsatisfactory, but also bizarre. The prosecution lawyer concluded by rebutting that any company could easily purchase Siemens' instruments and perform the same simple modifications, so this could not be considered a reasonable trade secret; on the contrary, the deliberate concealment of the matter confirmed that Holmes was deliberately misleading and deceiving investors in order to achieve the purpose of defrauding money [6,7].
Investors and partners who have been deceived
In September 2014, Holmes was seen in the midst of a campaign with Walgreens Pharmacy: Theranos was valued at $9 billion, making Holmes one of the richest women in the United States (worth $4.5 billion). She also appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine, where she was named the world's youngest self-made female billionaire.
In October 2014, after Theranos' project with the Walgreens drugstore chain went live, Holmes led at least two large financings. In both rounds, Holmes managed to fool into a number of U.S. business and political luminaries, including the Walton family ($150 million), the Walmart supermarket chain owner Walton family ($150 million), media mogul Rupert Murdoch ($125 million), the family of former Education Secretary Bets DeVos ($100 million), the Cox family ($100 million) owning Cox Communications, the third-largest network operator in the United States, and the Oppenheimer family ( $20 million), one of the owners of diamond brands De Beers. Partner Fund Management ($96 million), Carlos Slim ($30 million), one of Mexico's richest businessmen, Andreas Dracopoulos ,$25 million), Owner of Berkeley Engineering ($6.2 million), and other individual investors who have not been made public by the media and amount to more than $70 million [ 10,11]。
Unfortunately, the highlight moments belonging to Theranos and Holmes lasted only a year before they ended.
In October 2015, John Carreyrou, an investigative journalist for the Wall Street Journal, published an in-depth investigative report on Theranos [12]. The report exposed many of Holmes's misrepresentations about Theranos and its technology, including that until then the vast majority of Theranos' blood testing programs had been performed using third-party instruments, and that intravenous blood was still the primary method of blood collection.
On the day the in-depth report was published, Holmes immediately attacked the article through the media, strenuously denying the facts listed in the article. In addition, she scrutinized whistleblowers in both incumbents and former employees, even sending whistleblowers to follow them and sending lawyer letters to whistleblowers in an attempt to silence them in a threatening manner. Two former employees later said in interviews that during that year they changed jobs, addresses, cell phone numbers, and lived in deep fear [3,6,7].
Holmes's denial was futile. Shortly after John Careyru's article was published, the Sifway supermarket chain decided to terminate its partnership with Theranos, which also meant that the US$350 million invested in the Sivwe partnership project was lost .5]
John Kerry Lu's in-depth investigative reports have also caught the attention of regulators. In January 2016, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Supplement Services (CMS) conducted a surprise inspection of Theranos' laboratories and found a number of non-compliant experiments and testing operations [5]. CMS said that if Theranos fails to respond in a timely manner and correct multiple issues of laboratory non-compliance, the agency will ban Holmes from running any laboratory.
Subsequently, the Walgreens chain of pharmacies stopped sending blood samples to Theranos' laboratory. In June 2016, the Walgreens pharmacy chain officially announced the termination of all cooperation with Theranos and the closure of 40 in-store blood testing sites that had been opened. Like Sivway, Walgreens' $140 million investment ended up in nothing. That same month, Forbes reduced Theranos' valuation from $9 billion to $800 million, while revising Holmes's own value to zero.
The huge bubble that Holmes spent more than a decade blowing out would not end there when it was punctured. In July 2016, CMS revoked Theranos' testing license and barred Holmes from operating any laboratory for two years (in April 2017, Theranos and CMS reached a settlement).
At this point, Holmes is still trying to "save himself." In August 2016, Holmes unveiled Theranos' latest instrument prototype, mini-Lab, at an academic conference and announced that the company would no longer provide testing services and would instead sell test-related instruments [5]. Holmes made this shift most likely because of the CMS ban. Unfortunately, in September 2016, Theranos failed to pass the second compliance lab check, and mini-Lab could not continue selling.
In addition to the heavy blows of the regulatory authorities, There is a large wave of legal disputes waiting for Theranos [5-7]. In October 2016, Partner Fund Management, an early investor in Theranos, took Theranos to court and demanded $96 million in damages. In November 2016, the Walgreens drugstore chain took Theranos to court, demanding $140 million in damages. Theranos companies have all opted to reach a compensation agreement. In January 2017, the Arizona attorney general announced that he would sue Theranos corporation for false propaganda. In April of that year, Theranos settled with Arizona and paid Arizona $4.65 million. In March 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against Holmes for fraud. That same month, Holmes reached an out-of-court settlement with the SEC for a $500,000 fine, relinquishing control of Theranos and not being able to serve as a top executive in any public company for the next decade.
In June 2018, U.S. attorneys in Northern California ended a two-year investigation into Theranos. That same month, a federal grand jury, on behalf of the U.S. government, formally filed 11 charges of fraud against Holmes and Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, the former chief operating officer of Theranos Corporation[2]. Meanwhile, Holmes resigned as CEO of Theranos.
In September 2018, Theranos officially closed down. In the 16 years since 2003, Holmes has raised a total of $1.4 billion, most of it after 2013, and with the fall of Theranos, all investors have lost their money.
Svengali-style defense
In the face of the prosecution's detailed evidence, Holmes and her team of lawyers experimented with delaying tactics and played frequent tricks on defense strategies [6,7].
For example, her lawyers demanded stricter criteria for jury members — for which they designed a 56-page questionnaire to screen jury members. Because the trial took place in San Jose, Silicon Valley, where Theranos made its fortune, and to ensure that the jury did not have any preconceived biases, Holmes's team of lawyers asked jury members not to read John Careyru's in-depth investigative report and his book Bad Blood, as well as any negative coverage related to Theranos. Thanks to John Kerry Lu's bestseller Bad Blood, Theranos story is almost a household name in Silicon Valley, so there are very few qualified jury candidates who meet the requirements of Holmes' defense team. To that end, the court went to great lengths to select the jury personnel.
As another example, the prosecution asked Holmes's team to provide all electronic evidence (including more than 80,000 text messages, emails, etc.), but Holmes's team refused the prosecution's request on the grounds that "it could not prove the authenticity of this electronic evidence" – so the prosecution had to ask PwC's notary to spend an additional 10,000 hours verifying the authenticity of each text message and email.
Holmes's team, for example, directly asked for a postponement of the trial date — because Holmes's due date coincided with the original trial date.
As for the defense strategy, Holmes's team also struggled. Holmes initially planned to stand trial with former CHIEF Operating Officer Sonny, but later the teams parted ways and demanded separate trials. In the recent trial of the defense to present evidence, Holmes's defense team decided to let Holmes himself go down to defend himself. Her personal testimony and responses to the prosecution and defence cross-examination lasted seven days, the longest of any witness to testify.
Holmes gives the "king bomb" in this link's defense - Sonny. She said that during her tenure as CEO of Theranos, she had a nearly decade-long relationship with Theranos' former chief operating officer, Sunny[ 3,6,7]. During the relationship, she was subjected to mental and physical abuse by Sonny, as well as sexual abuse. The abuse she had suffered prevented her from making any decisions she wished—every decision she had made under Sonny's mental control and at the mercy of her. She showed a handwritten note by Sonny describing several of his codes of conduct. She also showed a handwritten note of her own time: She got up at four in the morning, meditated, exercised, bathed, prayed, and ate a simple breakfast, after which she would leave for work at 6:45. She said her schedule was completely controlled by Sonny.
Figure 5 Holmes' handwritten schedule presented in court
In 2002, Holmes and Sonny met on a trip. That summer, Holmes graduated from high school. She attended a summer study tour organized by Stanford University to Chinese China. On that trip, she met her teammate Sonny, who was twenty years older than him. The love for Chinese has left a good impression on each other.) After the trip, the two remained in touch.
Then, Holding back tears, Holmes told the jury and the audience why she suddenly decided to quit school in 2003 to start a business— she had been raped while she was in school. After that, she often confided in Sonny. Sonny has worked in Silicon Valley for many years, was an early employee of Microsoft, and successfully sold a company he founded, so his life and work experience are quite rich. For young Holmes, Sonny not only provided emotional solace, but was also able to provide valuable advice on the way to starting a business. Soon, the two entered into a romantic relationship and lived together. At first, Sonny didn't work at Theranos, but according to people close to Holmes, Holmes often discussed the company's affairs with Sonny. In 2009, Sonny officially joined Theranos as Chief Executive Officer. From 2009 to 2016, Sonny managed all aspects of the company's business as the company's second-in-command. During this time, Holmes has been hiding her close relationship with Sonny, and almost all investors do not know that the first and second leaders of Theranos are actually lovers (some investors have said that if they knew about their relationship at that time, they would have made different investment decisions).
According to investors, partners, and company employees, Holmes has the final say on most matters (meaning, Sonny isn't the last person to make the decision). In 2016, Holmes broke down in the face of unannounced regulatory inspections and the constant public opinion that followed the publication of "Bad Blood". Sonny then leaves the Theranos (Holmes said she fired Sonny, but Sonny's defense team denied this claim).
Figure 6 Sonny (left) with Holmes | Left: reutersagency.com Right: Photo by Max Morse for TechCrunch
In court, Holmes's defense attorney reviewed Holmes's relationship with Sonny and read some of the text messages between Holmes and Sonny, particularly those that reflected Sonny's desire to control her. For example, Sonny once wrote in a text message: "Every time your family comes over, I feel lonely. I've been with you for less than ten minutes these days. Holmes replied, "I hate that too. ”
In addition to the text messages, Holmes recalled what Sonny had once said to her. For example, Sonny once told Holmes, "You have no idea what you're doing. Your perception is wrong. I'm shocked at how mediocre you are. If you follow your instincts, you're bound to fail. You need to kill your original self and become a new self in order to succeed. ”
Svengali was a musician in the 1894 novel Trilby by the French writer Georges du Morie, who was able to control others through the use of mysterious evil forces. In the novel, he mentally controls a young female model and uses mysterious powers to train the female model to become a famous singer. Soft Hat caused a huge sensation at the time and influenced many contemporary and late writers, including the French writer Gaston Louis Alfred Le Roux. LeRoux's novel Phantom of the Opera was inspired by Soft Hat.
In recent years, there have been many defendants in U.S. courts who have alleged to have committed crimes against their will because of mental control by older and more experienced people, a defense strategy known as the Svengali defense [7,14]. For example, Joka Shaniev, who was responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, used this tactic in his trial [15].
During cross-examination, Holmes admitted that in her meetings with investors, collaborators, board members, and media reporters, all of her remarks were not coerced or controlled by Sonny [6,7].
Sonny's trial is expected in the first half of 2022, so during holmes' trial, Sonny and his team declined to respond to accusations and statements against him.
Although Holmes claimed to have been abused by Sonny for several years and had psychological problems as a result, her team did not bring in a psychologist to testify (in other similar cases, advocates typically asked psychologists to provide professional testimony about the defendant's psychological problems). So, all the evidence supporting Holmes's "victim" argument is currently coming from Holmes himself. It is worth mentioning that Holmes herself acted like an unreliable narrator during the trial — when the defense lawyer questioned her, she was able to answer all the questions fluently, but when the prosecution lawyer cross-examined her, she did not know: did not know, did not remember, did not know. So, the jury needs to answer the question: Am I going to trust her testimony?
That's the subtlety of the case: What the jury needs to judge is whether Holmes intended to defraud. If the jury in this case believes that Holmes was misled and mentally controlled by Sonny by those around him, the jury may have found that Holmes's deception was not intentional. If the jury accepted the claim, Holmes might have been acquitted.
However, Holmes's Svengarry defense strategy did not work – the jury unanimously found Holmes guilty of four counts of fraud against investors [1].
Epilogue
Although the story of Bad Blood is almost universally known, what awaits Holmes is by no means a bland ending.
The story about Holmes is intriguing, bizarre, but overwhelming. More than one journalist who has followed and reported on her for years has admitted that she can watch Holmes-related news all day without tiring [6,7]. This unfinished story is like a suspense novel, and all the viewers are involuntarily waiting for her to update.
If you can put aside the judgment of her good or bad for a while, you will find that her story can always shock you, with a touch of freshness, as if it will never go out of style. If interpreted in terms of the feelings of those around her, it means that everyone is trying to understand her, but probably no one can really understand her.
When Sonny left Theranos in 2016, his relationship with Holmes also ended. After that, Theranos ran wild downhill. Holmes faces daily questioning from regulators and the media, as well as legal proceedings from investors, partners and regulators. If you think Holmes has lived a life of "rats in the streets, everyone shouting and beating" since then, you're wrong.
In mid-2017, Holmes, 35, met 27-year-old William "Billy" Evans at a friend's party. By then, the Theranos scandal was already known, and Holmes would be awaited years in legal proceedings against her and Sonny.
Billy is a wealthy man whose family owns a hotel chain in the San Diego area of California. Billy grew up well, earning an undergraduate degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an exchange semester at Fudan University. After graduating with a bachelor's degree, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group.
Such a brother who sounds promising and has a prominent value has fallen in love with Holmes, who is trapped in the center of public opinion. And his feelings for her were very sincere—he genuinely wanted to marry Holmes. The idea was met with strong opposition from her family—Holmes was a woman who lied to the media, to investors, and to partners. Moreover, her fraud charges are likely to be convicted. If convicted, she faces up to two decades in prison and a hefty fine. But that doesn't cut off Billy's desire to connect with Holmes.
In early 2019, Billy persuaded his family to get engaged to Holmes. He proposed with an MIT commemorative ring unique to MIT graduates. Although this ring looks ordinary, it is a meaningful ring that only graduates of MIT can have. A friend of Billy's speculated that Billy did not use a diamond ring to propose because any object of some value on Holmes's body could be confiscated by the judge after she lost the case.
Figure 7 Exclusive ring for MIT graduates
Holmes and Billy had a wedding in mid-2019. In July 2021, their first child was born.
At the beginning of the trial, her defense attorney stressed to the plaintiff, the judge, the jury, and the entire audience that Holmes was a new mother and that her family would accompany her throughout the trial. During the four-month trial, Holmes did appear at the same time as her husband and mother. A university study showed that when defendants were new mothers or pregnant women, they were significantly less likely to be convicted by a jury than other defendants; if they were found guilty, they were given lesser sentences than other inmates [18].
Holmes' story has become an important chapter in contemporary American business history and Silicon Valley culture. On the first day of the trial at the end of August, three blonde women, dressed in Holmes' signature black turtlenecks, sat in the back row of the audience to express their support for her. On the social media Tik Tok, Holmes has also become a new generation of Influencers — some young women are even proud of her — and while most of them know holmes' fraud is a crime, they still feel that in a male-dominated business world, a woman can raise hundreds of millions of dollars by improper means, which is simply a "fighter" among women. However, some female entrepreneurs believe that Holmes does not represent the current situation faced by most female entrepreneurs , which are still much more difficult to finance than male entrepreneurs [19].
Apple recently announced that they are about to shoot a movie based on holmes and Theranos story. The film's lead actress will be Jennifer Lawrence (the eldest cousin). Streaming media Hulu also plans to shoot a TV series based on Holmes' story. Even after Theranos went out of business, lab clothes bearing the company's logo were sold online for a high price.
Figure 8 Apple shoots a movie based on Holmes (left), with the heroine played by the eldest cousin (right) | Image source: 9to5mac.com
The money of Theranos investors seems to be lost. But what Silicon Valley lacks most is new ways and means of creating value. Just recently, an investor successfully sold a large amount of money as a non-fungible token (non-fungible token) as a paper stock certificate obtained when he invested in Theranos in the early days [20].
Holmes's should continue to appeal. No matter how Holmes's story ends, all the people and things associated with her and Theranos have become the absurd legends of our time.
References: (Swipe up and down to browse)
https://apnews.com/article/elizabeth-holmes-trial-theranos-ceo-fb79a29d3c426a5cadee7ec5734b6f24 (Accessed 01-04-2022)
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/us-v-elizabeth-holmes-et-al (Accessed 01-04-2022)
Carreyrou, John (2018). Bad blood : Secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley startup (First ed.). New York: Knopf. ISBN 9781524731656. OCLC 1029779381
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler (Accessed 01-04-2022)
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-history-of-silicon-valley-unicorn-theranos-and-ceo-elizabeth-holmes-2018-5#by-the-end-of-the-summer-it-appeared-to-be-the-end-for-the-company-itself-the-wall-street-journal-reported-in-september-2018-that-the-company-told-its-shareholders-that-it-planned-to-formally-shut-down-37 (Accessed 01-04-2022)
The Dropout – Elizabeth Holmes On Trial, ABC News, 2021
Bad Blood: The Final Chapter, John Carreyrou, Three Uncanny Four, 2021
Joseph E. Oesterling, Prostate Specific Antigen: A Critical Assessment of the Most Useful Tumor Marker for Adenocarcinoma of the Prostate (1991), Journal of Urology, doi:10.1016/S0022-5347(17)38491-4
https://www.forbes.com/profile/elizabeth-holmes/?sh=19f1012747a7 (Accessed 01-04-2022)
https://news.crunchbase.com/news/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-trial-investors-board/ (Accessed 01-04-2022)
https://www.businessinsider.com/rupert-murdoch-cox-enterprises-invested-in-theranos-2016-11 (Accessed 01-04-2022)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-has-struggled-with-blood-tests-1444881901 (Access 01-04-2022)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilby_(novel) (Accessed 01-04-2022)
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-137-56580-8_10 (Accessed 01-04-2022)
https://www.bostonherald.com/2015/03/09/experts-svengali-defense-viable-in-tsarnaev-trial/ (Accessed 01-04-2022)
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/life/a26961001/elizabeth-holmes-fiance-billy-evans/ (Accessed 01-04-2022)
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/3160968/who-elizabeth-holmes-husband-billy-evans-inside (Accessed 01-04-2022)
Starr, Sonja B., Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases (August 29, 2012). University of Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper, No. 12-018, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2144002 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2144002
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/technology/theranos-elizabeth-holmes.html (Accessed 01-04-2022)
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/16/early-theranos-investor-to-sell-stock-certificate-as-nft.html (Accessed 01-04-2022
Plate editor| Lucas