 This is what happens when you work to change things. This is what, this is what, this is what happens. First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and they fight you, fight you, fight you. I've done something in this world that has made it a little bit of a better place, better place, better place. The judge just sentenced Elizabeth Holmes for 11 years, three months in prison, in prison, in prison. And then all of a sudden you change the world, change the world, change the world. This is what happened. First they think you're crazy, then they fight you. So you're paranoid, and you have to be. Yeah, one of the most paranoid people in the flesh. From CEO who graced the cover of Forbes as a self-made billionaire, to convict sentenced to 11 years in prison with a net worth of zero. I don't think there's a story as shocking as the story of Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the disgraced tech company Theranos, was delusionally confident and prideful. Our favorite corporate cult leader who girlbossed a little too close to the sun. And just recently, Elizabeth met her downfall. The magazine has downgraded the net worth of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of a startup blood testing company, from $4.5 billion to nothing. Breaking news on Theranos. The SEC is charging Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, raising more than $700 million from investors through an elaborate years-long fraud. The judge just sentenced Elizabeth Holmes to 11 years, three months in prison. But the questions I keep asking myself throughout the story of Elizabeth Holmes is, did Elizabeth maliciously try to harm and deceive people? Did she try her best to create a legitimate company from an impossible dream? Or did she accidentally stumble upon a flaw in the system as blind and ignorant to her own deceit as she claims to be? Hi friends and internet acquaintances, welcome or welcome back to another video on my channel covering controversial figures. And this video is on the destructive legacy of Elizabeth Holmes and her recent trial and conviction. If you've been subscribed to this channel for a while, first off, thank you so much. That means the world to me, that you stuck with me on this journey for this long. But also you probably remember that I did a video on Elizabeth Holmes a few years back, but there's so much that has happened recently with Elizabeth Holmes that I feel like needs to be covered and talked about. So let's get into the video. And before we get into this video, this video is sponsored by Grammarly. So I don't know if you know this, but apart from some research assistance, I research and script all my own videos. And well, it takes at least two to three days to script each video, especially now that I have a toddler who is running around like crazy and causing havoc the second I turn my head. So I could use a little extra assistance. 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Sign up at grammarlygo.com slash C-W-H-M and get 20% off Grammarly Premium. Thank you so much to Grammarly for sponsoring this video. I love Grammarly Go and hope you find it as helpful as I do. And now let's get back into the bizarre story of Elizabeth Holmes and how she ended up getting sentenced to 11 years in prison. Elizabeth Ann Holmes is a former biotechnology entrepreneur who founded the disgraced blood testing company Theranos. Elizabeth Holmes was born in 1984 in Washington, DC. Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV was a vice president at Enron, an energy company that later went bankrupt. Her mother, Noelle Ann, worked as a congressional committee staffer. The Holmes family has been said by multiple sources to be obsessed with their legacy. One of Elizabeth's paternal great great grandfathers was Charles Louis Fleishman, a Hungarian immigrant who founded the Fleishman yeast company. And the Holmes family was very proud of its yeast empire. The family friend Joseph Fuiz has been quoted saying, I think the parents very much yearned for the days when the family was one of the richest in America. And I think Elizabeth channeled that and at a young age yearning for the yeast. If we go back, I think we have to look at your lineage initially because your great grandfather was an inspiration. Your parents were inspirations. I mean, this whole vision of yours and making a difference and doing the kinds of things that you're not doing a really revolutionized healthcare go back in a sense to childhood and to really your genealogy in many ways. I grew up in a family that was very focused on the belief that we're all here for a reason and we're here to try to make this world a better place. And as a young child, I think it's fair to say that this yearning to restore the family name passed down to Elizabeth. She was noted to be extremely competitive and very determined, often telling relatives that she wanted to be a billionaire when she grows up. I got really interested in building something. Elizabeth also excelled in school, was a straight A student, spoke Mandarin and even started her own business selling C++ to Chinese schools. Later on, Elizabeth Holmes attended Stanford University's summer Mandarin program. And then in 2002, Holmes got into college at Stanford University where she studied chemical engineering and worked as a student researcher and laboratory assistant. Elizabeth Holmes initially wanted to go into studying medicine, but she ended up discovering that she was terrified of needles and later has said that this fear of needles was actually what inspired her to create her company, Theranos. People don't like big needles being stuck into their arm. Yeah, part of it. You're one of those people, right? Deeply so. I won't do it. Elizabeth Holmes spent the summer after her freshman year attending the Genome Institute in Singapore, and she got the job partly because she spoke Mandarin. You know, you're 19. You'd been working overseas because you speak Mandarin, of course. After the summer program, Elizabeth went back to Stanford and as a sophomore, Elizabeth Holmes went to one of her professors, Channing Robertson, and said, hey, let's start a company. That's a normal thing for a college student to ask a professor, right? But Channing was actually on board for this. And with his blessing in March of 2004, Elizabeth dropped out of Stanford School of Engineering and used her tuition money as seed funding for a consumer healthcare technology company. So the question was, what was the process of dropping out of Stanford when I was 19? Like, interestingly, it was a fairly binary decision. It became really clear that, you know, I was at a point where another few classes in chemical engineering was not necessary for what I wanted to do. Elizabeth Holmes ended up founding the company Real Time Cures, later changing the company name to Theranos, a combination of the words therapy and diagnosis. But a funny tidbit is that early in the company days, due to a typo, all the employee checks would say real-time curses instead of real-time cures. The company was based in Palo Alto, California and its goal was said to democratize healthcare. But Elizabeth Holmes' main goal was to accomplish what many deemed impossible. Due to her fear of needles, she wanted to create blood tests that would only need a small drop of blood. So the first thing we did was to make it possible for every laboratory test to be run on a tiny drop of blood instead of requiring tubes coming from your arm. Make it possible to do the tests on tiny drop of blood that could be taken from a finger. When Holmes pitched the idea to reap vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived from the tip of a finger to her medicine professor, Phyllis Gardner at Stanford, Gardner responded, "'I don't think your idea is going to work,' explaining that it was literally impossible to do what Holmes wanted to do. And several other expert medical professors told Elizabeth Holmes the same thing. There are things that you can do with a single drop of blood. You can test your blood sugar level, for example. But there are other things where a single drop is just not realistic. There might not be high enough concentration of what you're trying to measure in a tiny drop. Studies have shown that important blood markers such as white blood cell count or hemoglobin can vary greatly from one drop to another when obtained via the finger. But even if individual drops were identical, certain tests need to separate out cells with a centrifuge or add specific chemicals to the samples that would make repeat testing impossible." However, Holmes did not relent with the idea and continued the concept that would one day become theranos. I feel like in the Palo Alto ecosystem, the Silicon Valley bubble that it can be sometimes, as a startup founder, you're often admired for having the guts to do what no one else dares to do. But it's sort of a different thing when actual medical professors at Stanford are telling you, this is impossible. It's not admirable for you to be like, you're telling me it's impossible, but I'm still gonna do it. At that point, when you're ignoring medical professionals and professors with years of experience, you're just delusional. You're not brave or daring or thinking outside the box. You're just a little delulu. Of course, me calling Elizabeth Holmes delusional is not meant to make fun of Elizabeth Holmes mental health. I just mean it in a literal sense that Elizabeth Holmes's actions don't read to me personally as someone who's deeply rooted in reality. But what's even more interesting is that those around Elizabeth Holmes actually seem to encourage her behavior and lean into her sort of delusions of grandeur. What probably helped with Elizabeth Holmes delusions was the fact that her engineering professor, Channing Robertson, was so behind everything that she was doing. I've taught thousands of students, probably tens of thousands of students at Stanford. And I knew right away that I was dealing with something very, very different. Which again, they're wanting to start a medical tech company. You need medical experts, but Theranos was infamous for having very little medical experts involved in their company and instead focusing on engineering. I didn't really want scientific input from what I could determine. Engineering a little bit more because she was inventing an engineering device, but not medicine. Which again, if you're messing with people's bodies, if you're taking blood from them and deriving data from that, you need medical people who know what they're talking about. But because Channing Robertson was so on Elizabeth Holmes' side and so all for what she was doing, I'm sure that added to the delulu. In fact, Channing Robertson became the company's first board member and introduced Holmes to venture capitalists. And on top of that, adding to the delulu, Holmes raised money from very prominent investors in Silicon Valley, like Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, who was the father of one of Elizabeth's childhood friends and the founder of a prominent VC firm, Draper Fisher Jervitson. Have you seen the technology? Oh, yeah. You've seen it. And there were 50 tests run on one drop of blood, two drops of blood, 50 tests, two drops of blood from your fingers. Yes. And it worked beautifully. It worked. Yeah, it worked beautifully. Do you trust the results? Yeah, I do. Would you bank your life? Because they came up, yeah, they came up similar to the test results that I had in the doctor's office. Imagine if you have an idea for a company that medical professors literally tell you is impossible, but you're like, you know what? Let's see. I'll try it anyways. And then all of a sudden, another professor from Stanford gets on your board and all of these massive, prominent, biggest venture capitalists in Silicon Valley invest into your company, invest millions into your company. I'm sure it's hard not to look at that and be like, well, if they believe in me, maybe I can do this because they're supposed to be the smartest in the industry. But Elizabeth Holmes took these investors' money on one condition, that she wouldn't have to reveal how the Theranos technology worked because it's a trade secret. Give me millions, but just trust me, bro. It works. And they did that. And they gave her money. Like, I'm sorry. But at that point, it's on you if you're giving someone millions without even knowing how the technology works. Maybe you have too many millions to spend already if you can do that. Elizabeth Holmes also demanded that she have final say over everything that happens in the company. But what Elizabeth Holmes ended up eventually becoming the most famous for was her style. I guess I should be wearing a black turtleneck today because if you wanna become an entrepreneurial success these days, you need a uniform. Elizabeth Holmes was an admirer of Apple founder Steve Jobs and deliberately copied his style, you could say. I think that's a little bit fair to say. Elizabeth would frequently dress in a black turtleneck sweater, as Steve Jobs did. But Holmes said that her mother would often dress her in a black turtleneck and that she had just always worn black turtlenecks from the age of eight. You have the patent black turtleneck turt mark. So have you been inspired by Steve Jobs as well? Well, you know, well, the turtleneck. My mother had me in turtlenecks when I was a little girl. But yeah, of course I've been inspired by Steve Jobs. It had nothing to do with Steve Jobs. Like yeah, he's cool, like his work. I would also like to put out there that I have always worn black turtlenecks as well. Maybe you can't see that from my previous videos, but you know, when I wasn't filming I was always in a black turtleneck. On a real note though, when planning out this video I ended up discovering that I have two black turtlenecks in my closet, which I feel like is an odd amount of black turtlenecks to have, especially when I was completely unaware that I had them in the first place. During most of Elizabeth Holmes public appearances she spoke in a really deep, baritone voice. We'd like to see a world in which every person gets access to this type of basic testing. This is the first step. You know what it sounds like? Do or do not, there is no try. I've done something in this world that has made it a little bit of a better place. This is what happens when you work to change things. And a lot of people just wondered, why? Why are you doing that? I mean, to be completely honest there's been debate over whether or not this deep voice is Elizabeth Holmes natural voice. But I feel like at this point we can look back and be like, come on. She was so clearly deliberately talking in a deep voice. I know women who have a naturally deep voice and they don't sound like Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes sounds like she's forcing her voice and that's gotta be painful on your vocal cords. Former Theranos colleague later claimed he heard Elizabeth speak in a voice stereotypical of a woman of her age to welcome him when he was hired. Phyllis Gardner also denies that Holmes has a naturally deep voice. In ABC's podcast on Elizabeth Holmes called The Dropout former Theranos employees said the CEO sometimes fell out of character, particularly after drinking and would speak in a higher voice. Her family however has maintained that her deep voice is authentic. I mean, I'm sure that Elizabeth has a somewhat naturally deep voice but not like this type of deep voice. As a 19 year old, how do you go about the process of convincing people that you know what you're doing and that you can pull it off? I think the first piece is realizing that it's not necessarily about age. You almost wonder if it's really her fault that people didn't see these red flags sooner. Especially considering the fact that she named her prize machine, the machine for Theranos, the Edison which Thomas Edison was known to basically lie about his inventions and sort of fake it until he made it and then in the end he was able to sort of pull it off and get all the praise. Edison's greatest invention may have been himself. The first celebrity businessman Edison's secret was knowing how to tell a good story in which he cast himself as the main character. We codenamed our product the Edison because we assumed we'd have to fail 10,000 times to get it to work 10,000 at first. She named her machine off of someone who did great things but also kind of was like a little bit of a liar and no one questioned it. It's like if an MLM company named one of their products pyramid scheme. At that point, if someone buys that MLM product it's kind of their fault. I'm kidding, obviously. Scammers, grifters, liars, cheaters are never okay but you get what I mean, right? Like let's also do a little bit of critical thinking here especially if you're giving a company millions of dollars. By December of 2004, just like a year, less than a year after Elizabeth started her company Elizabeth Holmes raised $6 million to fund her startup which by the way, I am not an expert in startups or investment money but why does a company that barely even exists and has zero customers? Why does that company need $6 million? But by the end of 2010, six years into the company with by the way basically no working product Theranos raised more than 92 million in venture capital as a company that was operating in stealth mode which means it had no website. It wasn't in distribution yet. It didn't have a working product and Theranos ended up raising 700 million from investors. So as Theranos started to rake in millions of funding Holmes became the subject of media attention and a claim in the tech world. Elizabeth Holmes graced the covers of Fortune and Forbes gave a TED talk and spoke on panels with Bill Clinton and Alibaba's Jack Ma. Elizabeth for example, she can talk about this but she has become wildly popular among those of us who follow things like this for developing a comprehensive blood test that will tell you all kinds of stuff. In July of 2011, Elizabeth Holmes was introduced to former secretary of state, a Shate was introduced to former secretary of state, George Schultz. And after a two hour long meeting, George Schultz joined the Theranos board of directors. And over the next few years, Elizabeth Holmes got more and more prestigious people on her board. Tons of important people to know like, what's his name? Maddox, Maddog Maddox, that guy was on her board to the point that Holmes was recognized for forming the most illustrious board in US corporate history over the next three years. And one of the things that you've done is put together this amazing board. Three former US cabinet secretaries, two former US senators, a retired Navy admiral and a retired Marine Corps general. Why? Her board of directors was like a board that you would form for apocalyptic military takeover situation not running a medical tech company But again, at this point when Elizabeth had this board of directors, Theranos was still operating in stealth mode with no press releases or a company website until September of 2013, which was when the company announced a partnership with Walgreens to launch in-store blood sample collection centers. We've publicly announced that we are going to deploy nationally with Walgreens building these wellness centers inside our old Walgreens. Which again, Walgreens agreed to this partnership when Theranos had zero customers and basically zero proof, long-term proof that their product worked. Strangely, Walgreens never looked inside any version of the magic box to see if it could deliver what Theranos promised. And I mean, I can't help but give at least a little bit of credit to Elizabeth Holmes for being able to pull that off, for getting an entire board of directors of some of the most powerful people in the world with no proof that her product worked, getting 92 million in investments and funding with no proof that her product worked, getting a long-term partnership with Walgreens with no proof that her product worked. How does one pull that off? You have to be a very skilled manipulator, a very skilled bullshitter. But there's a whole other element to this that I am definitely not smart enough to understand or uncover. But I do think it has something to do with company hype when all these investors are buying into this company and saying it's gonna be the next big thing and almost worshiping Elizabeth Holmes as this celebrity entrepreneur, putting her on the cover of magazines, calling her the next Steve Jobs. All these powerful people probably saw that, wanted to believe in her dream, got on board, literally, ha ha. And then Walgreens saw all this hype and was like, we wanna get in, we wanna be part of the innovation of the next big thing in medicine. So I think it's just all this hype, snowballing and snowballing and people believing the dreams that Elizabeth has sold them and logic just never seemed to enter the picture. But it seems that all of this lying and deceiving really got to Elizabeth Holmes and the way that she ended up conducting her company. You have had just a really interesting trajectory with this company. You were very secretive for a long time. Elizabeth hired bodyguards to drive her around in a black Audi sedan. Her nickname was Eagle One. The windows in her office had bulletproof glass. There was a curie. You couldn't go walk up into her office. That just doesn't happen. She had bulletproof glass on their exterior windows. There are bodyguards waiting outside. So as Elizabeth gained more and more attention and Theranos was hyped up more and more, there was an increase in paranoia within the company. So you're paranoid and you have to be. Yeah. I wanna be the most paranoid people on the planet. Sonny Balwani, Elizabeth's partner in crime even tracked employee whereabouts and allegedly read their emails. Departments were separated within the company and not allowed to communicate with one another. Almost as soon as they started, they say, life at Theranos was just a little bit off. How would you describe the culture of Theranos? Justin? Not a lot of camaraderie, a lot of paranoia. The office environment was designed to not really interact with anybody else. She believed on multiple levels of secrecy and compartmentalization. You got a sense that not everyone in the company at that time really knew what was happening from a holistic picture. And I was hardly, I think, through a somewhat intentional effort. Adam says the departments were purposely kept separate, designed so no one could catch on that the technology didn't actually work. So basically no one could talk to other people and what they were doing, put two and two together and realize, oh, we're doing nothing. Our entire career is bullshit and this is all bullshit. Something I thought was funny to note that came out in the recent trial of Elizabeth Holmes is that the only people who really seemed relaxed around the office were Elizabeth's brother. I believe his name is Christian. Yes, his name was Christian Holmes V. Who she brought into a senior management position within Theranos, even though he had zero medical experience. Elizabeth's brother also hired a bunch of his friends and their nickname in the company was the Thera Bros. Gotta love nepotism. 2014 was one of the biggest years for Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. Not only did Elizabeth Holmes appear on the covers for basically all the magazines in business, Fortune Forbes, New York Times, Style Magazine and Inc. But by the end of 2014, her name appeared on 18 US patents and 66 foreign patents. Even though it's been reported that her staff was basically the ones who were creating the patents and Elizabeth signed her name on them. During 2015, Elizabeth Holmes established agreements with Cleveland Clinic, Capital Blue Cross, AmeriHealth Caritas to use Theranos technology. Again, with no major proof that it works at all. And she also already had agreements in place for Safeway and Walmart. And the company's valuation sword because it was making claims all over the place that Theranos had the technology to revolutionize blood testing by developing methods that needed only very small volumes of blood, such as from a finger prick. Help us understand how you are able to actually make this happen. So go through the whole list of all the tests that are run in a traditional lab. And instead of requiring tubes coming from your arm, make it possible to do the tests on tiny drop of blood that could be taken from a finger. And... How much blood are we talking about? A few drops. It's a little tube. It looks about that big. You call it a nanotainer, right? You call it a nanotainer. Very cute. Yeah, and very into miniature things. And the finger prick analogy was used in all of their marketing, most infamously with the picture of Elizabeth Holmes holding up a tiny vial of blood, like this. In 2015, Forbes had named Elizabeth Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the United States on the basis of a nine billion valuation of her company. So let's reevaluate the facts here. Elizabeth Holmes started the company in her early 20s after dropping out of Stanford University. She had no background in engineering besides studying it at Stanford briefly and had zero medical background and was afraid of needles. She dressed like another famous CEO, spoke in a very obviously fake voice and refused to show anyone how the technology worked, claiming it all to be a trade secret. So why did no one question this? Why were people so trusting? The credibility of Theranos was attributed in part and mainly to all of Elizabeth Holmes' personal connections and her ability to recruit the support of very influential people, including Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, Jim Mattis and Betsy DeVos, all of whom either had served or would go on to serve as U.S. presidential cabinet officials. And they all had incredible things to say about Elizabeth Holmes holding her in the highest regard. Excellent, Mrs. Holmes. She has a sort of a serial quality. She is like a member of a monastic order. She aligned herself with very powerful older men who seemed to succumb to a certain charm. And those powerful men could influence people and they could ever meant influence the Department of Defense. All this support lent to her credibility because why would all of these incredibly influential and powerful people back someone who was a total fraud? I knew she'd had this brilliant idea and that she'd managed to convince all these investors and scientists. So Dr. Jeffrey Flyer, the former Dean of Harvard Medical School who met her for lunch in 2015, she was self-assured. But when I asked her several questions about her technology, she didn't look like she understood, he added, though he never formally assessed her technology. It seemed a bit odd, but I didn't come away thinking it was fraud. The following year, after the Forbes article and Elizabeth skyrocketing into fame and fortune, revelations about Theranos' potential fraud began to surface. The Silicon Valley blood testing startup Theranos under fire in recent weeks made questions over its testing technology's ability to deliver accurate, fast and cheap results. A remarkable turn just underscoring this downfall made of somebody who was once mentioned in the same breath as Steve Jobs. Forbes revised its estimated net worth of Elizabeth Holmes to zero and fortune named her in its feature article on the world's 19 most disappointing leaders. The decline of Theranos began in 2015 when a series of journalistic and regulatory investigations revealed doubts about the company's claims and whether Holmes had misled investors in the government. John Carreyou of the Wall Street Journal initiated a secret, months-long investigation into Theranos after he received a tip from a medical expert who thought that Theranos' Edison blood testing device seemed suspicious. And the fact that it took someone, let's see, it's 2015, the fact that it took someone 11 years to start questioning Theranos, this company was in existence for 11 years before someone started asking questions and looking into it is so beyond me. John Carreyou spoke to ex-employee whistleblowers and obtained company documents. And basically through this, he learned that Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos itself was a total fraud. When Holmes learned of the investigation, she initiated a campaign through her lawyer, David Boyce, who's known to be a very prestigious but very aggressive lawyer, to stop Carreyou from publishing his investigation. And David Boyce would basically threaten John Carreyou with legal and financial threats and also threatened the Wall Street Journal and all of the company whistleblowers. Theranos issued a press release calling my reporting false and they were threatening us with litigation. The journalism here has been so bad, they deserve to be sued, but lawsuits rarely resolve issues. And infamously, one of these whistleblowers was George Schultz's grandson. One of her former employees was at first to blow the whistle about the problems at the company. Tyler Schultz says he quit after Holmes and her partner, Sonny Balwani, ignored his complaints about falsified research, then shared his concerns with the state regulator and then he went to the Wall Street Journal. But in this case, the truth prevailed. In an October of 2015, despite the legal threats and strong arm tactics, the journal published John Carreyou's bombshell article detailing how the Edison device gave inaccurate test results. At what point do you start to think something isn't right here? I think the transition happened is when I started processing patient samples and it kept failing. I kept running it over and over and over. And how it was handled totally blew me away. They took out data points and they said, oh, well, this is like the best two out of six, the way that we kind of averaged things. So you're saying essentially that you were cherry picking exactly information. But Holmes denied all of the claims, calling the Wall Street Journal a tabloid and promising that the company would publish data on the accuracy of its tests. Again, the fact that the company was valued at $9 billion and had not yet published data on the accuracy of its tests is mind-blowing to me. Elizabeth Holmes appeared on CNBC's Mad Money the same evening the article was published. Jim Cramer said the article was pretty brutal. Your article was pretty brutal. But here on Mad Money, we know something. We know that there are two sides to every single story. This is what happens when you work to change things and first they think you're crazy, then they fight you and then all of a sudden you change the world. And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you, Carrie Yu. Sorry, I had to. In January of 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, CMS, sent a warning letter to Theranos after an inspection of its new work, California Laboratory. CMS uncovered irregularities with staff proficiency, procedures, and equipment. Basically no one had a procedure in place or was doing the same thing when working with their blood testing devices. And apparently this discovery by CMS was so bad that CMS regulators proposed a two-year ban on Elizabeth Holmes from owning or operating a certified clinical laboratory. U.S. regulators dealt a major blow to Theranos Bounder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, banning her from operating a blood testing laboratory for at least two years and yanking regulatory approval for its California lab. But Holmes, instead of, you know, hungering down and fixing her company, was still out doing media interviews. And on the Today Show, after news of this broke, Holmes said, she was devastated we did not catch and fix these issues faster. In November, a federal inspection by CMS, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, found critical violations at one of her two labs. According to regulators, the lab posed immediate jeopardy to patient safety. I feel devastated that we did not catch and fix these issues faster. You're running a healthcare startup. You're dealing with people's lives. You're dealing with test results that doctors prescribe medicine based on that. So one would think that you would have had that in place from the get-go. Absolutely. And probably the most devastating part of this is that I thought we did. Shortly after, Walgreens ended its relationship with Theranos and closed its in-store blood collection centers. A big loss for Theranos. Walgreens now cutting ties with the embattled blood testing company. Walgreens will stop offering Theranos's services at its stores, marking the latest blow for the company. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also ordered the company to cease its use of its capillary tube nanotainer device, one of its core inventions. It feels like in 2016, all of the regulators were like, oh yeah, we haven't looked into them. Maybe we should do that. And then all of the regulators were like, oh, shit, this is really bad. And the company just collapsed in on itself from there. In 2017, the state of Arizona filed suit against Theranos, alleging that the company had sold 1.5 million blood tests to Arizonians while concealing or misrepresenting important facts about these tests. No shit. Maybe you should have looked into Theranos a little bit more before letting 1.5 million citizens get blood tests from them. In April of 2017, Theranos settled the lawsuit with the state of Arizona by agreeing to refund the cost of the tests to consumers and to pay 225,000 in civil fees and attorney fees for a total settlement of 4.65 million. Other reported ongoing actions against Theranos include an unspecified investigation by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and two class action fraud lawsuits and homes continued to deny any wrongdoing. On May 16th of 2017, approximately 99% of Theranos shareholders reached an agreement with the company to dismiss all litigation and potential litigation in exchange for shares of preferred stock. So Holmes released a portion of her equity to offset any dilution of stock value to non-participating shareholders. And this is basically why Forbes changed Elizabeth Holmes' net worth to zero because all the other shareholders in the company had preferred stock. And since the fraud was uncovered, the company lost a ton in its valuation. So after all the preferred stock was withdrawn, basically Elizabeth Holmes would be left with nothing. That's as best as I can describe it. Forbes magazine has downgraded the net worth of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of a startup blood testing company from $4.5 billion to nothing. Forbes says all of her net worth was tied up in the company, which was devalued when its blood tests proved inaccurate. In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, and former Theranos Chief Operating Officer, Sunny Balwani, with raising $700 million from investors through a massive fraud. Elizabeth Holmes, what Silicon Valley's fastest rising star is now under the harsh glare of a very different kind of spotlight as she's investigated for an alleged elaborate years-long fraud. The charges of fraud include the company's false claim that its technology was being used by the U.S. Department of Defense in combat situations. Holmes was telling investors that the machines were already being used on military helicopters in combat zones. The company also completely lied when it claimed to have a $100 million revenue stream in the year 2014. That year, the company only made $100,000. The terms of Elizabeth Holmes' settlement included surrendering voting control of Theranos, returning 18.9 million shares to the company, a ban on holding an officer or director position in a public company for 10 years, and a $500,000 fine. Basically, by that point, Theranos was over. At its height in 2015, Theranos had more than 800 employees. It dismissed 340 people in October of 2016 and an additional 155 in January of 2017. In April of 2018, Theranos filed a worn-out notice with the state of California, announcing its plans to permanently lay off 105 employees, leaving it with fewer than a dozen employees left. When you look at the massive building that Theranos was in, in Palo Alto, and you see footage of company meetings and work events with hundreds of employees, it's strange to imagine this massive building built for an extremely successful company to only contain a dozen employees, like a ghost town of a failed business and a fraud exposed. And on September 5th of 2018, the company announced that it had begun the process of formally dissolving, with its remaining assets to be distributed to creditors. Theranos is closing up shop, the embattled blood testing company announced on Wednesday that it would close its laboratory operations, shutter its wellness centers, and lay off about 340 employees, around 40% of its workforce. The saddest thing about the story of Theranos is not only that it was, in essence, a great idea that would have helped a lot of people, people with disabilities or those who have a hard time giving large amounts of blood at once, users who already have problems with their veins and also nurses and medical practitioners who don't have to do the whole blood extraction process. I know that's not the right word. It would have helped so many people and I'm sure it was an exciting concept for many and a huge disappointment when it was a total fraud. It's also, I'm sure, devastating to the employees who believed in the vision of Theranos, especially the ones who had been there from day one. I know there is one person who unalived themselves because of the fraud of Theranos, because they had been so involved with Theranos from its start. Rochelle Gibbons was married to a former chief scientist at Theranos who died by suicide back in 2013. She blames homes and Theranos for her husband's death. I also personally think the biggest wrongdoing of Theranos was giving these blood tests out to people, knowing full well that they weren't ready and that the blood tests did not work or were not as effective as traditional methods because the Edison machine didn't work. They would basically take these small, small amounts of blood, dilute it a bunch and put it through the traditional machines, which created very inaccurate results. There were multiple doctors who claimed that the results from the Theranos blood tests were all over the place and made no sense for the patients. Their downfall was when they started giving us results that were not matching up with other labs. No one from Theranos ever called me to apologize. That's the least you can do when you mess up so badly. And that is extremely dangerous and could have harmed so many people. And instead of focusing on that, it seemed that Elizabeth was solely focused on her image, getting on as many covers as possible, doing as many cool marketing shots as possible and recruiting as many powerful people as she could so that she would never have to deal with the repercussions of her lies. It seemed that Elizabeth Holmes was living in a completely delusional world where she believed that she could pull this off at the last minute and everything would be okay. But at the same time, I would say her focus wasn't in the right place. Her focus sort of dates back to what her family's focus always was, their legacy, not actually doing something of value. Something funny and a little bit more lighthearted to note is in Theranos' final days, Elizabeth Holmes reportedly got a Siberian husky who she named Balto that she would bring into the office. However, Balto wasn't potty trained and would go to the bathroom inside the company's offices and during meetings. So Balto was shitting on the company just like Elizabeth Holmes on the company. It's my personal opinion as a total non-expert in engineering and medicine. Theranos probably could have worked if Elizabeth Holmes was willing to pivot away from her idea, a finger prick of blood to use in this tiny device to gather a bunch of data. I mean, she could have had that going on in the background but used her team of freaking 800 employees and $700 million in funding to come up with something else in the meantime that they could have used that could have equally changed people's lives. But instead, she became so rooted in this idea of the Edison that wasn't working no matter how hard her team tried at it, that she threw it all away. Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 to start a biotech company. Today that company, Theranos, is worth billions. The net worth of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of a startup blood testing company from $4.5 billion to nothing. She is going to pay a $500,000 penalty and be barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years, as well as returning the remaining 18.9 million shares the SEC says that she obtained during the fraud. Despite being the subject of a book written by John Kerryu, an HBO documentary, a TV series and an upcoming film, it's still completely unclear why Elizabeth Holmes took such a gamble on technology she knew didn't work. Inventor and businessman Richard Fuiz speculated that there must have been immense pressure on Elizabeth Holmes to succeed. Elizabeth Holmes' parents spent much of their careers as bureaucrats on Capitol Hill. They were very interested in status and lived for connections, Richard told BBC. And the family was very conscious about their lineage, he said. And it's fair to say that her obsession with her legacy ruined her legacy. Throughout most of Theranos' history, Elizabeth Holmes was romantically involved with technology entrepreneur Ramesh Sunny Balwani, a Pakistani-born Hindu who immigrated to India and then the US. Elizabeth Holmes met Sunny Balwani in 2002 during her trip to Beijing as part of Stanford's Mandarin program. Holmes was 18 at the time and had just graduated high school. Balwani was 19 years older than Elizabeth Holmes and married to another woman at the time. Although Balwani did not officially join Theranos until 2009 when he was given the title of Chief Operating Officer, Balwani was advising Elizabeth Holmes behind the scenes since Theranos' inception. And Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani ran their company with a corporate culture of secrecy and fear according to employees. Sunny supposedly tracked all the key card entries and exits, so you would be identified each time we went into any area. We would send emails, not CC Sunny or Elizabeth, and we would get a response back from Sunny. So it's really important that you all understand that what we are doing here is so disruptive that we will always be attacked. So to me, it just seems like Sunny Balwani, at the very least, did not help the situation of fraud going on in Theranos. Sunny Balwani and Elizabeth Holmes' romantic relationship was also kept secret throughout their time working at the company. And Balwani left Theranos in 2016 in the wake of investigations. But the story of Sunny Balwani and Elizabeth Holmes gets much deeper and darker. On November 29th, 2021, Holmes testified that she had been R-worded while she was a student at Stanford and that after the incident, she sought comfort and solace from Sunny Balwani, someone she had known previously from her trip to Beijing. Elizabeth Holmes also said that Balwani was very controlling during their romantic relationship, which lasted more than a decade. She said at times Sunny Balwani berated her and abused her. Elizabeth Holmes is literally a known bold-faced liar, though a police report has been uncovered of the R-word incident that Elizabeth mentioned at her time at Stanford. And also it's important to believe victims, so I'm kind of very split on this accounting of events from Elizabeth's perspective. I thought at least it'd be important to mention it and you guys can think whatever you want to. However, she also testified that Sunny Balwani had not forced her to make any false statements to investors, business partners, journalists, and company directors. And it seems that since Theranos started to fall apart, the two had gone their separate ways. I mean, at the very least to give credit to Elizabeth, she met Sunny Balwani when she was freshly 18 and he was almost 20 years older than her and married at the time. And they entered into a very strange relationship with a very bizarre power dynamic where he was a multi-millionaire and she was a college student. And then he became not only romantically involved with her, living with her, also heavily involved in her company and becoming the COO. So at the very least, there was a bizarre power dynamic going on there and just weird vibes. Is that fair to say? Weird vibes. Sunny Balwani, weird vibes. That's my characterization of him. In early 2019, Elizabeth Holmes became engaged to William Billy Evans, a 27-year-old heir to Evans Hotels, a family-owned group of hotels in the San Diego area. Elizabeth and Billy reportedly first met in 2017 and were seen together in 2018 at Burning Man, the art festival in the Nevada desert. And the couple reportedly posts photos professing their love for each other on a private Instagram account. Billy Evans' parents were reportedly labbergasted at their son's decision to marry Elizabeth Holmes, which I feel like is a very accurate word to describe how you would feel if you find out that your child is marrying one of the most disgraced CEO slash frauds of all time. It would just be like, why? What do you love about her? Her ability to lie and create a massive fraud scheme? Interesting choice, son. I would definitely be flabbergasted. In mid-2019, Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans reportedly married in a private setting, though the two have not directly confirmed whether or not they're married. They live together in San Francisco and it seems throughout all of this commotion, their relationship has continued to stay strong. The pair had a son together in July of 2021. In early 2023, Elizabeth Holmes gave birth to a daughter. I find this whole story bizarre because something that's really sad and tragic kind of about this whole story is that it starts out with Elizabeth as a child wanting to restore her family's forgotten legacy and then it ends with her having destroyed her legacy and now bringing children into the world who will have such a bad name and legacy because Elizabeth Holmes is their mother. Despite her confirmed fraudulent actions and behavior, Elizabeth Holmes has gained a cult following as the hashtag girl boss on TikTok and fans of Elizabeth Holmes have continued to idolize her, dubbing themselves Holmes, which is hilarious. Our favorite corporate cult leader who girl bossed a little too close to the son, Elizabeth Holmes. And most of the Holmes jokingly support the alleged fraudster, but there are others who genuinely back Elizabeth Holmes and support her through all of this. Holmes often dress up as Elizabeth Holmes and make dedicated content about her. Am I a homie? Three women dressed as Elizabeth Holmes even made an appearance outside the federal courthouse in San Jose, California in a show of solidarity. The hashtags Elizabeth Holmes and girl boss have exploded on social media with many capitalizing on what was once a joke. TikTok user Rainia Blake told Insider that she was an Elizabeth Holmes fan as a joke, posting memes about the troubled entrepreneur in June. But by August, Blake was selling Elizabeth Holmes as my hashtag girl boss T-shirts on Etsy for $22 to $25, promoting the merchandise to all of her followers. Oh my God, hi, girl bosses. So I make the Elizabeth Holmes as my girl boss shirt on Etsy. I'm in a hotel right now, so I don't have it on me, but I truly do wish that Elizabeth Holmes had an MLM so I could join it. And this is the other side of the line. Which I mean, I think that's fair to do. And I think that shirt's hilarious. I would definitely get one. Another TikTok user, Serena Shahidi, sorry if I said your last name wrong, said there is something admirable about Holmes' rise from Stanford University dropout to tech billionaire to modern day villain. I guess there's empowerment in the idea of having a female villain because that's typically something that's like very taboo. There's something kind of progressive about the idea that a woman in the news isn't playing by anyone's rules, which I do kind of agree with. I mean, at this point, Elizabeth Holmes has lost everything. She has nothing to lose. It's a fascinating story of someone's meteoric rise and then downfall and how they exist in society after that. Of course, people could make fun of women who genuinely support Elizabeth Holmes, see them as a joke or their entire ideology as ridiculous. But I would argue that there are people who support Andrew Tater Tot or the Wolf of Wall Street. People who actually idolize those men and look up to them, men who are known for committing heinous crimes or massive fraud, are practically worshipped by many in society. So I guess let the women and whoever else want to support their girl boss queen, Elizabeth Holmes. On Facebook, pages dedicated to Elizabeth Holmes exist and fans of these pages often comment on news about Elizabeth Holmes with we believe in you Steven D. Benning, an associate professor of psychology, told Insider that the phenomenon regarding support for Holmes is nothing new. He said that homies may think if someone so competent as Elizabeth Holmes could be taken advantage of so badly, that might help explain some of the problems that I've had with people taking advantage of me as well. I think in a weird way, we have a fascination with underdogs and people that have nothing to lose. People who experience such a massive downfall but there is literally nowhere else to go. They have reached the very, very bottom of rock bottom and seeing how people handle that sort of situation and where they go next is fascinating. And where Elizabeth went next was right to court. So on June 15th, 2018, following an investigation by the US attorney's office for the Northern District of California in San Francisco that lasted more than two years, a federal grand jury indicted Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, both pleaded not guilty. Elizabeth Holmes, once Silicon Valley's fastest rising star is now under the harsh glare of a very different kind of spotlight. This calls his razor right hand. Suddenly, the woman who always seemed to have all the answers. We are the only lab company that is actually really focused on leading with transparency. Now had none. I don't know specifically, I'm not sure. I don't know exactly, I just don't know. Prosecutors alleged that Holmes and Balwani engaged in two criminal schemes, one to defraud investors, the other to defraud doctors and patients. Elizabeth Holmes was tried in the US District Court for the Northern District of California with US District Judge Edward DeVila presiding and Elizabeth Holmes retained defense lawyers from Williams and Connolly, a prominent American law firm that specializes in white collar crime defense. The trial began on August 31st, 2021 after being delayed for over a year due to COVID and Elizabeth's pregnancy. The case was prosecuted by the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California. It was a stunning fall from grace. Elizabeth Holmes is the stamper dropout who became a tech billionaire after claiming to revolutionize lab tests using a single drop of blood. Now she faces a criminal trial. The list of possible witnesses for the trial named roughly 200 people, including the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, James Mattis and Elizabeth Holmes herself. In opening statements, prosecutors argued that out of time and money, Elizabeth Holmes decided to lie. Meanwhile, the defense argued that although Theranos ultimately crumbled, failure is not a crime. Trying your hardest and coming up short is not a crime. Over the course of 11 weeks, prosecutors called 29 witnesses to testify, including former Theranos employees, investors, patients and doctors before resting their case in November. The defense then began making its case, calling just three witnesses, including Elizabeth Holmes herself. On the stand, Elizabeth admitted that she added some pharmaceutical company's logos to Theranos' reports without authorization. Investors previously said they took some reassurance in those reports because based on logos, they thought major pharmaceutical companies had validated Theranos' technology. Holmes said she added the logos to convey that work was done in partnership with those companies. But in hindsight, she wishes she had done it differently. Holmes also acknowledged on the stand that she hid Theranos' use of modified commercial devices from investors. She said she did this because the company council told her that alterations the company made to the machines were trade secrets and needed to be protected as such. Interesting, your trade secret is that you have no trade secrets. That's an interesting trade secret to have, I guess. Elizabeth testified in self-defense for seven days, claiming among other things that she was misled by her staff about the technology and that her ex-romantic partner, Sunny Balwani, who was also facing trial, held influence over her during the romantic relationship they had and which was still ongoing when the alleged criminal acts happened. During the trial, Elizabeth expressed regret and said she wished she had operated the company differently. Every day for the past years, I felt deep pain for what people went through because I failed them. Lawyers for Holmes argued that she was being unfairly punished for running a business that failed and that she made a good faith attempt to succeed before the company imploded. But the case's evidence outlined Holmes' role in faked demonstrations, falsified validation reports, misleading claims about contracts and overstated financials at Theranos, which I would say is not trying your best to genuinely succeed, but trying your best to fake success. We're now about halfway through the closely watched criminal trial of the Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes. She's charged with conspiracy and fraud over claims she made about her company's blood testing machine, which as it turned out, didn't work. In closing arguments, prosecutors argued that Holmes chose fraud over business failure, which I think is a very fair assessment. While the defense argued she was building a business, not a criminal enterprise. I think, of course, an aspect that comes into all of this is the fact that fake it till you make it is sort of a common ethos in the Silicon Valley startup world. When everyone else around you is lying, deceiving, inflating numbers, it's easy to think it's almost commonplace when in fact, this can be a very dangerous practice as we can see in the case of Theranos. After 15 weeks of trial, Elizabeth Holmes' case headed to a jury of eight men and four women on December 17th of 2022. The jurors deliberated for a total of seven days before telling the court on January 3rd of 2022 that they were deadlocked on three of the 11 charges against Holmes. The judge read off some jury instructions to the group and court before instructing them to go back and deliberate further. Hours later, the jury returned a mixed verdict for Holmes, finding her guilty on one count of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud. They found her not guilty on four other counts and failed to reach a verdict on the remaining three counts. And interestingly enough, the counts that Elizabeth was found guilty of were all related to investments. She wasn't convicted on any of the charges involving patients who received inaccurate test results, which I think is a great injustice because let's be honest, at the end of the day, people who are investing into a company have a lot of money to spend, especially if they're investing millions into a company. If they lose that money, they just lose money, not their health, not their life. In my opinion, the real people that were done a great injustice are those who trusted their health and the future of their health into the company Theranos, which to me is a lot more valuable than money invested into it. It's wild that Elizabeth Holmes got away with that much and that ultimately what she was found guilty for was really all related to money and people giving her money. Of course, it's wrong to lie about financials and deceive investors into investing in your company, but also part of me feels like these people who invested are considered so successful and powerful, like the Walton family who was behind the Walmart empire. Like they had some money to spare, at the very least. Them losing out on their investment into Theranos barely put a dent into their wealth. And on top of that, they were deceived by a Stanford dropout in her early 20s. Like that's kind of on you. I don't know, but that's what a jury found her guilty of. Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty on four counts of defrauding investors, three counts of wire fraud and one of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. It was a mixed verdict. Did the jury get it right, do you think? Yeah, so there are four counts that they had a guilty verdict for defrauding investors, but there were another four counts that were for defrauding patients. And those four, she was found not guilty. And then there were an additional three others where there was no verdict that was reached. But for me, one was enough, so I'll take four. Elizabeth Holmes awaited sentencing while remaining at Liberty on a $500,000 bail, which was secured with property. And Elizabeth Holmes faced a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000, plus restitution for each count of wire fraud and for each conspiracy count. Elizabeth Holmes' lawyers asked the judge for home confinement and community service and no more than a year and a half in prison, citing her toddler and now newborn child who needed care. But prosecutors asked the judge that Elizabeth Holmes be sentenced to 15 years in prison, arguing that she chose lies, hype and the prospect of billions of dollars over patient safety and fair dealing with investors. Elizabeth Holmes had 10 years of running a fraudulent company and possibly putting people in harm's way. So I guess I wanna ask you guys, how much time do you think personally Elizabeth Holmes should spend in prison for mainly defrauding investors, AKA lying to investors to get their money for her company? There were more than a hundred people who wrote in to the judge in support of Elizabeth Holmes. And today in court, just before the judge read the sentence, she was allowed to get up and speak. I wanna read a couple of quotes to you that were given to us by our colleague, Rachel Metz, who was in the courtroom. She said, I loved Theranos. It was my life's work. She was emotional and saying that the team meant the world to her. And she said, quote, the people I tried to get involved with Theranos were the people I loved and respected the most. I am devastated by my failings. Well, ultimately, Judge DeVila handed down a prison term of 11 years and a quarter. On November 18th, 2022, U.S. District Judge Edward DeVila sentenced Elizabeth Holmes to 135 months in prison and ordered her to surrender by April 27th of 2023. The judge just sentenced Elizabeth Holmes to 11 years, three months in prison. Everyone got silent in the courtroom. The judge gave kind of a long speech about how fraud is not an excuse for what goes on here in Silicon Valley. He sentenced her again to slightly more than 11 years. This is a fraud case where an exciting venture went forward with great expectations and hope only to be dashed by untruth, misrepresentations, hubris and plain lies. Said DeVila last November before announcing his punishment. I suppose we step back and we look at this and we think what is the pathology of fraud? Is it the inability or the refusal to accept responsibility or express contrition in any way? Now, perhaps that is the cautionary tale that will go forward from this case. DeVila recommended she be incarcerated at Federal Prison Camp, Bryan in Texas, a minimum security facility with limited or no perimeter fencing. A misprison is regarded as one of the best prisons that you could go to, basically. But nonetheless, Elizabeth has since her sentencing done everything she possibly could to get out of going to prison. In May of 2022, Elizabeth Holmes pleaded with a judge to toss her conviction. In a 24 page filing on May 27th, Holmes attorneys argued for her acquittal but the presiding judge tentatively denied Elizabeth Holmes's request in September. But that was not the end. Holmes filed three motions requesting a new trial, one of which centered on the testimony of a witness who allegedly went to Elizabeth Holmes's house in August and expressed regret that he helped convict her. The witness was former Theranos lab director Adam Rosendorf. According to an account of the incident from Billy Evans, Holmes's partner, he said he felt guilty. He said when he was called as a witness, he tried to answer the questions honestly but that the prosecutors tried to make everybody look bad in the company. He said that the government made things sound worse than they were when he was up on stand. He said he felt like he had done something wrong and that this was weighing on him. He said he was having trouble sleeping. Elizabeth Holmes notched a small victory when the presiding judge ordered an evidentiary hearing regarding Rosendorf's testimony and him appearing at her home but the evidentiary hearing proved useless to Holmes. As witness Rosendorf said he stood by his initial testimony and only went to her home because he was distressed at the idea of Elizabeth Holmes's children growing up without a mother. So on November 8th, the presiding judge denied all three of Elizabeth Holmes motions for a new trial and bizarrely after Elizabeth Holmes's conviction her and her partner allegedly attempted to flee to Mexico according to prosecutors. Elizabeth Holmes's legal team said that her and her partner bought the tickets to Mexico in hopes that she would be found not guilty of all counts and be free and able to travel and that Elizabeth Holmes ended up canceling her ticket after she lost the case and her partner went to Mexico without her. Judge DeVila later ruled that these tickets to Mexico were a bold and ill-advised action but you know, what can you do? Elizabeth Holmes is a bold gal but Judge DeVila didn't believe that these tickets were necessarily an attempt for Elizabeth to flee. Booking international travel plans for a criminal defendant in anticipation of a complete defense victory is a bold move and the failure to promptly cancel those plans after a guilty verdict is a perilously careless oversight. Judge DeVila said. So Elizabeth's sentencing was final even though she tried to do everything she possibly could to change the fate she sealed when she chose to lie but because of all of Elizabeth's attempts at an appeal under the 9th US Circuit Appeals Court Rules Holmes' surrender has been automatically delayed until the court decides on her latest bid and in accordance with court rules since Elizabeth was on bail when she filed the motion her prison reporting date has been automatically delayed. The same legal maneuver was used successfully by Sunny Balwani, the former COO of Theranos. He was able to postpone his sentencing by about a month but Sunny Balwani ultimately exhausted his options just like Elizabeth will eventually do and reported to a federal prison in San Pedro, California in early April to begin his nearly 13 year sentence. So now a judge is deciding whether Elizabeth Holmes can delay the start of her 11 year prison sentence while she appeals her conviction in part due to her two young children and Elizabeth Holmes' case points to what experts say is a major blind spot in the prison system, the routine separation of mothers from their new babies. While researching for this video I found countless of articles about this problem how often women who are sentenced to prison shortly after giving birth have to be separated from their babies. Their children have to go and stay with family members who can sometimes be hours or states away from the prison and unable to travel to see their mother often. So many mothers are separated from their children due to the prison system and it's a huge issue especially for those in low income communities or those with few family members around who can help during that time. But there are a lot of people who believe that Elizabeth Holmes intentionally got pregnant to appeal to people's emotions just to pull on people's heartstrings at the idea of separating Elizabeth from her children in hopes that people would be more lenient on her and allow her to avoid prison time which if that was the case that would be a pretty messed up reason to bring children into the world. Recently Elizabeth Holmes appeared unbothered in new paparazzi photographs published by the Daily Mail in which she's grinning side by side with her fiance and clutching her infant daughter. Elizabeth gave birth to her daughter only three months ago and according to the Daily Mail who alleges that they obtained Elizabeth Holmes' daughter's birth certificate, Elizabeth named her daughter Invicta which is a feminized take on the Latin word meaning unconquered. What's the opposite of remorse? Yeah, that. An investor at Highland Capital Partners who passed on investing in Theranos in 2006 tweeted Tuesday, naming a kid after a poem that political and war prisoners often cite is precious. The demons of denial are raging. Minimum security prison camp with genshaw of the real housewives sadly won't fix that. Elizabeth Holmes was once hailed as the next Steve Jobs and said to be the world's youngest self-made billionaire and now Elizabeth Holmes' entire legacy is tarnished as she looks towards an 11 year prison sentence but on top of all the pain that she caused for those that were misled the case of Elizabeth Holmes is said to have created a stigma for other women entrepreneurs particularly in the science and healthcare industries and these women are often compared to Elizabeth Holmes. Writing in the New York Times technology journalist Erin Griffith commented that Holmes continues to loom large across the startup world because of the audacity of her story which has permeated popular culture with women entrepreneurs reporting that the frequent comparisons to Elizabeth Holmes are pernicious. So basically though Elizabeth Holmes was originally branded as a total girl boss inspiring women in the tech medicine and engineering spaces her own downfall from her selfishness and drive to succeed ended up doing the opposite giving women and leadership a bad reputation. Of course anyone with a brain would recognize that Elizabeth's actions do not speak for all women entrepreneurs or women in tech and engineering but for the idiots out there it's one more reason not to trust women in leadership. Elizabeth Holmes is an enigma, an anomaly her own island in which she operated from delusion and a desire to create a legacy off of an impossible dream. And I think the most bizarre aspect of the story of Elizabeth Holmes is the fact that we will probably never know why why she continued to lie even though she knew everything was all fake in a lie why she continued to raise funding and sell her product even though she knew it didn't work. I don't even think Elizabeth herself really knows why she continued to do it. It's all nonsensical. Even the fact that Elizabeth obtained $700 million in funding and a board of directors fit for taking over an entire country is all nonsensical. Sometimes people do things that make no sense. And I guess that's the lesson in this all. And to me, the saddest part of Elizabeth's downfall are the good intentioned people and the innocent people that went with her. The employees of the Theranos company that probably have a bad reputation with Theranos on their resume. The people who tried to get blood testing from Theranos who may have been harmed and most of all Elizabeth's children whose entire childhoods will be marked with tragedy. And at the end of all of this though a conclusion has been reached in a sense that Elizabeth has been sentenced to prison, reparations are being made for those who were harmed by her actions will still never really know why. Why Elizabeth went along with these lies for such a long time, letting them spiral out of control until her entire life came crashing down around her. And I guess all we can do is look for the warning signs that Elizabeth Holmes displayed in the next possible grifter. So that's all for today's video. Thank you so much for watching. If you made it to the end, I really appreciate that you watched my videos. If you made it to the end and are watching this right now comment how many black turtlenecks you have in your closet because now I'm interested if other people have a surprising amount of black turtlenecks that they didn't realize they had in their closet or if that's just me. And I hope you're doing well. I'll see you in the next video. Bye.