Washington, May 30 (EFE).- Elizabeth Holmes, the American entrepreneur who falsely claimed to have developed a revolutionary blood analysis system with her company Theranos, entered prison this Tuesday.
The former Silicon Valley star was sentenced on November 18 to eleven years and three months in prison for defrauding his company’s investors. Judge Edward Davila sentenced him to three years of probation after serving his sentence.
He started Theranos in 2003, when he was 19, after dropping out of Stanford University and devoting himself full-time to the company.
He is credited with claiming that his company invented a revolutionary technology that used a few drops taken from a fingertip to perform reliable and accurate blood tests for diseases ranging from cholesterol to cancer, reducing costs.
The interest sparked by investors due to the sheer power of these alleged analytics made him a billionaire at the age of 31 and compared him in the business world to Apple founder Steve Jobs.
His luck ran out in 2015 when The Wall Street Journal published a series of investigative articles questioning the credibility of Theranos’ experiments and the technology used for them.
The Justice Department filed charges against her, for which she faced a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Holmes entered a federal women’s prison in the state of Texas, according to media reports on Tuesday.
The woman, now 39, is the mother of two young children: her first son was born in July 2021, just weeks before her trial began, and her second daughter is three months old.
On May 17, he lost a last-ditch effort to avoid going to jail. A day earlier, Judge Davila ordered the victims who invested in his company to pay $452 million, meaning that newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch must receive $125 million or Walgreens, which must return another $40 million.
(c) EFE Agency