In case you’re wondering, Holmes speaks in a soft, slightly low, but totally unremarkable voice, no hint of the throaty contralto she used while running her blood-testing startup Theranos, now defunct.
“I made so many mistakes and there was so much I didn’t know and understand, and I feel like when you do it wrong, it’s like you really internalize it in a deep way,” Holmes said as we stopped to look at a hissing anaconda.
Billy Evans, Holmes’ partner and the father of their two young children, pushes a stroller with the couple’s 20-month-old son, William. William enjoys playing in the sand, “Little Blue Truck” and dumplings and, like his mom, already speaks some Mandarin. But William especially loves the San Diego Zoo, which is why, on a recent Thursday afternoon, I found myself in the surreal situation of trying to make sense of Holmes’ version of her rise and fall, while watching a restless cheetah and buying a gorilla T-shirt at the gift shop.
“How would you spend your time if you didn’t know how much time you had left?” Holmes said, her impending prison report date top of mind, perhaps even more so given that we were surrounded by animals behind bars. “It would be the kind of things we’re doing now because they’re perfect. Just being together.”
Holmes has not spoken to the media since 2016, when her legal team advised she go quiet. As the adage goes, if you don’t feed the press, we feed on you. In Holmes, we found an all-you-can-eat buffet. It had everything: the black turtlenecks, the Kabuki red lipstick, the green juices, the dancing to Lil Wayne. Somewhere along the way, Holmes said that the person (whoever that is) got lost. At one point, I tell her that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had pulled out of portraying her in a movie. She replied, almost reflectively, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”
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So why did she create that public persona? “I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn’t have good technical ideas,” said Holmes, who founded Theranos at 19. “Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn’t.”
Maybe?
Ten years ago, Holmes was the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, worth $4.5 billion (on paper, in Theranos stock), and one of the most visible and celebrated female CEOs on the planet, running a startup with a $9 billion valuation. Then, in 2015, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation into Theranos, calling into question whether its labs and technology – a sleek, boxy device called the Edison – actually worked as promised, testing for a wide range of illnesses with a tiny amount of blood collected with a rapid finger prick.
In 2016, federal inspectors from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found “deficient practices” in a Theranos lab that posed “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.”
That began a saga that would eventually lead to Holmes being convicted of criminal fraud charges.
The 15-week trial began in 2021 and featured extensive testimony about troubling practices at Theranos. The jury heard from several patients, including one who said a Theranos blood test revealed she was having a miscarriage when, in fact, she had a healthy pregnancy. Holmes was not convicted on any counts related to patients. But the testimony was a stark reminder of the human stakes of choosing biotech as your startup.
Holmes was found guilty in January 2022 on four of 11 charges that she defrauded Theranos investors out of more than $100 million. Her top lieutenant at Theranos, and much older boyfriend at the time, Ramesh Balwani, was found guilty of 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud at Theranos. He began a 13-year prison sentence last month. On Thursday, his legal team filed an appeal with the 9th Circuit.
During the closely followed proceedings, a prosecutor, Robert Leach, said this was a case “about fraud, about lying and cheating,” alleging that Theranos raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors by misleading them about its blood-testing technology’s capabilities.
Lance Wade, a lawyer for Holmes, said that his client “made mistakes, but mistakes are not crimes.”
By the time I met Holmes and Evans, they were counting the days until April 27, when she had been required to report to Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, for 11.25 years. (Shortly before she was due at prison, Holmes made a last-minute request to remain free pending an appeal, which automatically delayed her report date by an undetermined amount of time.)
Day 44: the afternoon we ordered in Mexican food at their quaint rental home near the Pacific.
Day 43: the morning we went for breakfast and Holmes breastfed her baby, Invicta (Latin for “invincible”) and sang along to Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants” on the loudspeakers (“This is the first album I ever owned”).
Day 42: the time we had croissants and berries and Evans made coffee and we walked the couple’s 150-pound Great Dane-mastiff mix, Teddy, on the beach.
On the second day we spent together, Evans asked me what the most surprising part of spending so much time with Holmes was. I told him it’s that I didn’t expect her to be so … normal?
I realized that I was essentially writing a story about two people. There was Elizabeth, celebrated in the media as a rock-star inventor whose brilliance dazzled illustrious rich men, and whose criminal trial captivated the world. Then there is Liz, (as Evans and her friends call her), the mom of two who, for the past year, has been volunteering for a rape crisis hotline. Who can’t stomach R-rated movies and who rushed after me one afternoon with a paper towel to wipe a mix of sand and her dog’s slobber off my shoe.
After Holmes was convicted, Rupert Murdoch, who invested $125 million in Theranos, emailed The Wall Street Journal, a newspaper he owns, calling himself “one of a bunch of old men taken in by a seemingly great young woman! Total embarrassment.” I am not a smarter or more astute observer of human behavior than Murdoch or George Shultz, the former secretary of state who helped end the Cold War, or James Mattis, the retired four-star Marine Corps general and former defense secretary, both of whom were Theranos board members and investors. So, how could I be sure that “Liz” wasn’t another character that Holmes had created?
I was admittedly swept up in Liz as an authentic and sympathetic person. She’s gentle and charismatic, in a quiet way. My editor laughed at me when I shared these impressions, telling me (and I quote), “Amy Chozick, you got rolled!” I vigorously disagreed! You don’t know her like I do! But then, something strange happened. I worked my way through a list of Holmes’ friends, family and longtime supporters, whom she and Evans suggested I speak to. One of these friends said Holmes had genuine intentions at Theranos and didn’t deserve a lengthy prison sentence. Then, this person requested anonymity to caution me not to believe everything Holmes says.
This warning stuck with me, and it got at something that had been gnawing on me since I first met Holmes. How do you have an honest conversation with a person whose fraud trial has played out so publicly? I tried to ask Holmes this directly. How do I believe you when you’ve been convicted of (basically) lying? But how could I ask someone who was nursing her 11-day-old baby on a white sofa 2 feet away if she was conning me?
It was in these uncomfortable exchanges that Evans often stepped in. “Your question is, ‘How do you say anything when everything you say is going to be doubted?’ You just have to say it,” he said.
So, to just say it: Holmes knows what you’re thinking about her trial, and the birth of her two babies.
When she alerted the court March 12, 2021, that she was pregnant with her first child, Leach, the prosecutor, called the news “frustrating.” The trial had already been delayed because of the pandemic, and was pushed back a few more weeks, until after she gave birth that July.
I’d hardly sat down in Holmes’ and Evans’ home the first time we met in person, when Holmes told me about her work at the rape-crisis hotline. She’d just finished a 12-hour shift, which she does a few times a week from home using her cellphone, answering calls when they come in.
She then put this work into context, telling me how surviving a rape at a fraternity party her sophomore year at Stanford had, in retrospect, colored so many of her life choices. It’s the part of her story that she keeps getting back to. The one she told a sympathetic, but ultimately undeterred jury, according to news reports. The one she wants people to (finally) listen to. (I later reviewed a 52-page Santa Clara police report that documented the details of the alleged sexual assault and Holmes’ injuries. Holmes did not press charges.)
Holmes hands the baby to Evans. “I’ll give her to you when we’re talking about this stuff,” she said. She continued, “I woke up with this guy who was my friend having sex with me and I couldn’t get him off of me.” Holmes said the assault, in October 2003, contributed to her decision to drop out several months later and start a company.
To help her do that, she turned to Balwani, known as Sunny, whom she first met in 2002 on a college trip to China. Holmes was 18. Balwani was 37 and had already successfully founded and sold a tech company.
In March 2004, her sophomore year, Holmes left Stanford and moved in with Balwani to get Theranos off the ground. (Balwani guaranteed a loan to Theranos and joined the company in 2009.) “I really thought I’d be safe,” Holmes said. “My friends at school and that whole universe, it didn’t exist anymore when I was with him. It was all gone.”
As Holmes explained it, echoing a key part of her defense strategy, Balwani kept close control over her every action. She detailed extensive domestic abuse and sexual assault. She said that Balwani forced her to stop speaking to her family and Stanford friends and pressured her to adopt the black-turtleneck, red-lipstick persona.
“He always told me I needed to ‘kill Elizabeth,’ so I could become a good entrepreneur,” she said.
Jeffrey Coopersmith, a lawyer for Balwani, denied the allegations. “Our client is not a person who is vindictive or mean spirited or aggressive,” he said.
She lived by entrepreneurial tenets that she said Balwani told her she needed to follow in order to succeed. These included not sleeping for more than five hours, going vegan, getting to the office daily by 5 a.m., no alcohol.
“It was only when people started to raise questions about the company that I started to see that he was not who I thought he was in business,” Holmes said of Balwani. “And then that made me start to question everything else.”
In person, Holmes is engaging, but she is also somewhat socially stunted. It’s as if Rip Van Winkle fell asleep in his early 20s in a startup and woke up a 32-year-old at Burning Man. That’s because in the 14 years Holmes led Theranos she didn’t do any of the normal things 20-somethings do, according to her friends and family.
Holmes had so few actual friends, she said, when she was running Theranos that she once pulled a female pharmaceutical executive aside to ask if the way Balwani treated her was normal in a relationship. However, the same person who warned me about Holmes pointed out that she seemed to have plenty of wealthy, famous friends in this period.
In 2015, when The Wall Street Journal first reported on serious flaws in Theranos’ technology, Debbie Sterling, an entrepreneur and classmate of Holmes’ from Stanford, reached out asking if Holmes needed someone to talk to. “She said, ‘I don’t have any friends. I only work, from the first thing in the morning until late at night,'” Sterling recalled. “It was kinda creepy.” She corrects herself, “Not creepy, but concerning.” They eventually met for breakfast in Palo Alto.
Sterling said she thought about her friend as two distinct people: There was “black turtleneck Elizabeth” and there was “real Elizabeth.” Sterling, along with several other Stanford friends, attended the trial to support Holmes. But first she bought brown drugstore hair dye, worried that being seen there might impugn her reputation.
In 2016, as regulators scrutinized Theranos, Balwani resigned. Theranos shut down its clinical laboratory and laid off roughly 40% of its estimated 790 employees. Holmes’ brother (and Theranos executive), Christian Holmes V, helped her pack up and move out of the mansion she’d shared with Balwani.
Holmes, barred from working in a medical laboratory for two years, checked into a hotel and then rented a two-bedroom home in Los Altos. She had almost no belongings, so her parents sent her some ’90s chintz furniture that they had in storage.
In 2017, as Theranos faced an onslaught of legal challenges, both civil and criminal, Holmes moved to San Francisco, where she met a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate and entrepreneur, Billy Evans, at a house party during Fleet Week to benefit wounded warriors. Evans had gone out to get ice for a party he was hosting at his own apartment and a friend texted to ask if he was going to the benefit. He agreed to swing by for a few minutes and never made it to back to his party.
A mutual friend introduced him to Holmes and the pair talked for three hours. “My friends were texting, ‘Where are you? We’re here,” Evans recalled. “To say we immediately fell in love isn’t an overstatement.”
Evans was 25 and living with roommates in San Francisco, but in many ways he was more mature than Holmes. She was 32 and had never opened a bottle of wine. “Elizabeth lived in complete isolation with Sunny,” her father, Christian Holmes IV, said. “It’s hard to explain the extent to which she missed so much of the growing up that someone does in their 20s.”
As Theranos settled an onslaught of civil lawsuits and federal prosecutors closed in on criminal charges, Holmes started to socialize again, reconnecting with family and friends. “Despite everything going horribly in her life, we had our daughter back, and it was wonderful to see how she used to be,” said her mother, Noel Holmes.
Holmes and Evans quickly became more than friends and moved in together. “It had been two years of all this stuff written about me, and I think you get to know someone in a totally different way when you walk in with that skepticism versus if you meet when everything is sunshine and roses,” Holmes said. “That allowed us to get to know each other in a really deep way.”
In 2018, the Justice Department indicted Holmes, accusing her of lying when she told investors that Theranos’ devices could quickly perform a full range of clinical blood tests using a finger prick, even though she knew the tests were unreliable, limited and slow.
The much-hyped box didn’t do much. And most of the promises that put Holmes on the map turned out to be fiction.
The Theranos board, failing to find a buyer for the startup, eventually dissolved the company.
Where do you go when your life’s work and reputation go up in flames? Burning Man.
Holmes and Evans went to the desert oasis for moneyed bohemians. She burned a tribute to Theranos. “There was an incredible sense of grief because I’d given everything to it, my whole life, since I’d been 18,” she said of that period.
The next year, in 2019, after U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila set a date for Holmes’ criminal trial, she and Evans hit the road. As prosecutors assembled their case, Holmes and Evans spent six months traveling the country in an recreational vehicle, sleeping in campgrounds and Walmart parking lots. Holmes balanced outdoor yoga and long hikes in national parks with working on her legal defense.
I tell Holmes (in so many words) that it seems like she became blissfully happy just as her life was falling apart. She does not disagree. “Even though that period was a crisis and Theranos was my life and like my child, I gave everything I had to it,” she said. After it was gone, “I also became free.”
At least, for now.
Holmes’ defenders, stretching back to childhood, said in letters to the court, and in conversations with me, that the feverish coverage of Holmes’ downfall felt like a witch trial, less rooted in what actually happened at Theranos, and more of a message to ambitious women everywhere. Don’t girl boss too close to the sun, or this could happen to you.
“There’s an unspoken lesson for female executives: You’re allowed to be successful but not too successful,” Jackie Lamping, a Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sister of Holmes’ at Stanford, wrote in a letter to Davila, who oversaw the trial.
Holmes said she believed that making herself the poster girl for women in tech put a huge target on her back. She regrets being the subject of fawning magazine covers (though I imagine the authors of those stories regret it more). “I never lost sight of the mission but I think I did of the narrative,” she said. “The story became this story that was totally snowballed away from what we were actually talking about.”
Of course, Holmes also tried to control the story, often with scorched-earth tactics. She is typically docile, but got visibly upset when I asked about how lawyer David Boies had threatened litigation against people who spoke negatively about Theranos.
Alex Shultz, the father of the Theranos employee turned whistleblower Tyler Shultz, and the son of George Shultz, told the court that Tyler “slept with a knife under his pillow every night thinking that someone was going to come and murder him in the night.” (Holmes and Boies parted ways and she replaced her legal team in 2016.)
“I’m still thinking about the journalists being intimidated,” Holmes said after we’d moved on to several other topics. “As I said at trial, I completely wish we’d handled that situation differently.” She tears up. “I take responsibility for it because I was CEO of the company and at the end of the day, that’s that, but I don’t believe in people being treated that way, period.” (In response to Holmes seemingly casting blame on her legal team, a spokesperson for Boies texted, “Whatever.”)
Holmes chooses her words carefully when I ask if the prominent men who invested and joined the Theranos board were drawn to the startup partly because the founder was an attractive young woman. “A lot of people were attracted to this for their own reasons,” she said.
What does she think would have happened if she hadn’t garnered so much early attention as the second coming of Silicon Valley? Holmes does not blink: “We would’ve seen through our vision.” In other words, she thinks if she’d spent more time quietly working on her inventions and less time on a stage promoting the company, she would have revolutionized health care by now.
The last day I spent with Holmes, I parked and walked up the long driveway to find her and Evans embracing in the kitchen. They looked like they were slow dancing, swaying slightly, the two of them against the world. Fireplace burning. Seagulls flying overhead. Teddy drooling in his crate. Babies (plural) sleeping.
Evans left for a workout, saying he doesn’t want “dad bod.” Holmes and I sat at the kitchen table alone, talking. She didn’t seem like a hero or a villain. She seemed, like most people, somewhere in between. As Holmes broke down thinking about what her children will be like in 11 years, I kept going back to her central promise at Theranos: The technology that she invented would, in her words, create “a world in which no one ever has to say goodbye too soon.”
And there she was, preparing to do just that.
That Friday, the couple were getting ready to host a group of friends from the Bay Area. They invited me to stay. They repeatedly invited me to come back, to bring my family. We could all go to the zoo.
I appreciated their hospitality, but I didn’t fully understand it. Usually interview subjects can’t wait to get rid of me.
Then I realized why they kept opening the door wider. Holmes is unlike anyone I’ve ever met – modest but mesmerizing. If you are in her presence, it is impossible not to believe her, not to be taken with her and be taken in by her. Liz Holmes and Billy Evans know that. I politely declined their invitation.
