THE Elizabeth Holmesthe former Silicon Valley star who was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for fraud, began serving her sentence in a Texas prison today.

THE Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) confirmed that the former businesswoman has arrived at the federal prison in Bryan. In January 2022, after a four-month trial, Holmes was convicted of defrauding her investors of Theranos, which it claimed would “revolutionize” medical diagnoses. She went to court several times asking not to be jailed pending the hearing of her appeal – in the hope that her conviction would be overturned – but all her requests were rejected.

At 39 already, twenty years after founding her start-up business, she is now in a “minimum” security women’s prison. According to the BOP website, these prisons have dormitories, few guards, and reintegration programs.

Theranos promised that through a revolutionary new technology, medical diagnoses could be made faster and cheaper, compared to traditional laboratories, using a minimal amount of blood for multiple tests. But this technology never worked and the company closed in 2018, leaving the investors who had boosted its capital with hundreds of millions of dollars in the dark.

Holmes has always maintained that she acted in good faith and did not intend to defraud investors.

In mid-May the judge Edward Davila ruled that Holmes and former Theranos chief operating officer Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani must jointly return $452 million to investors. Among the investors was Rupert Murdoch, to whom the two former partners owe $125 million.

Elizabeth Holmes

In a recent interview, Holmes claimed that she is unable to even pay her lawyers, whose fees are estimated at $30 million. “I’ll have to work my whole life to pay them back,” he said.

According to American media, in 2019 she married him Billy Evans, whose family owns a chain of hotels. She has two children.

In 2014 Forbes magazine estimated Holmes’ fortune at $4.5 billion and described her as the youngest self-made billionaire.