Elizabeth Holmes

About Me

Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford University and founded blood testing startup Theranos in 2003, with the aim of using just a few drops of blood. Theranos raised more than $700 million from investors (including from billionaires Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison), who valued the company at $9 billion. Forbes named Holmes the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire--worth $4.5 billion--in 2014, when she was 30 years old. Starting in 2015, Theranos' technology came into question; reporting by The Wall Street Journal revealed that Theranos was using other companies' machines. Forbes revised our net worth estimate for Holmes to $0 in June 2016 amid new information and as the company faced a slew of investigations from federal agencies. On January 3, 2022, Holmes was found guilty of four out of 11 charges of fraud; she was acquitted on four charges; the jury failed to reach a verdict on 3 counts.