SAN JOSE, Calif. — As Elizabeth Holmes prepares to report to jail next week, the criminal case that laid bare the blood-testing fraud at the heart of her Theranos start-up is gettingin its last stage.
The 11-year sentence represents a comeuppance for the wide-eyed lady who broke through “tech brother” culture to endedupbeing one of Silicon Valley’s most wellknown businessowners, just to be exposed as a scams. Along the method, Holmes endedupbeing a sign of the outrageous embellishment that frequently fills start-up culture.
But concerns still stickaround about her real intents — so numerous that even the federal judge who administered over her trial appeared dumbfounded. And Holmes’ protectors continue to ask whether the penalty fits the criminalactivity.
At 39, she appears most mostlikely to be keptinmind as Silicon Valley’s Icarus — a high-flying businessowner burning with negligent aspiration whose odyssey culminated in convictions for scams and conspiracy.
Her intentions are still rather strange, and some advocates state federal districtattorneys targeted her unjustly in their passion to bring down one of the most popular professionals of fake-it-til-you-make-it — the tech sector’s brandname of self-promotion that insomecases diverts into exaggeration and outright lies to raise cash.
Holmes will start to pay the rate for her deceit on May 30 when she is setup start the sentence that will different her from her 2 kids — a kid whose July 2021 birth postponed the start of her trial and a 3-month-old child developed after her conviction.
She is anticipated to be putbehindbars in Bryan, Texas, about 100 miles (160 km) northwest of her hometown of Houston. The jail was suggested by the judge who sentenced Holmes, however authorities have not openly revealed where she will be held.
Her numerous critics compete she shouldhave to be in jail for peddling a innovation that she consistently boasted would rapidly scan for hundreds of illness and other health issues with a coupleof drops of blood taken with a finger prick.
The innovation neverever worked as assured. Instead, Theranos tests produced extremely undependable results that might haveactually threatened clients’ lives — one of the most regularly pointedout factors why she shouldhave to be prosecuted.
Before those lies were exposed in a series of dynamite shortarticles in The Wall Street Journal start in October 2015, Holmes raised almost $1 billion from a list of savvy financiers consistingof