Washington (EFE).- The American entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, who with her company Theranos falsely claimed to have developed a revolutionary blood analysis system, entered prison.
The former Silicon Valley star was sentenced on November 18 to eleven years and three months in prison for having defrauded his company’s investors. Judge Edward Davila also imposed three years of probation on her after completing her sentence.
He started Theranos in 2003, when he was 19 years old, and dropped out of Stanford University to dedicate himself full time to that company.
He rose to fame for claiming that his firm had invented revolutionary technology to perform reliable and accurate blood tests for various diseases, from cholesterol to cancer, using just a few drops taken from the fingertips, thereby lowering costs. .
The interest aroused by investors due to the great potential of these supposed analyzes made her a billionaire at the age of 31 and in the business world she was compared to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
The fall of Elizabeth Holmes
His luck ran out in 2015, when The Wall Street Journal published a series of investigative articles questioning the credibility of Theranos tests 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, as the media stressed on Tuesday, entered a federal women’s prison in the state of Texas.
The woman, who is now 39 years old, is the mother of two young children: her first son was born in July 2021, weeks before her trial began, and her second daughter is three months old.
On May 17, he lost his last resort to avoid going to jail. A day before, Judge Davila ordered the payment of 452 million dollars to the victims who invested in his company, such as the press magnate Rupert Murdoch, who should receive 125 million, or the Walgreens pharmaceutical company, to which he must return another 40.