Hotgirl is a famous startup in the startup world: ‘Beautiful trick’ investors pour hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes becoming a billionaire with just an ’empty’ testing machine

In 2015, Elizabeth Holmes topped the list of America’s richest self-made female billionaires and the youngest female billionaire in the world with a fortune of $4.5 billion according to Forbes. However, later, the magazine itself re-evaluated and said that Holmes’s fortune was just zero.

Specifically, Forbes calculated Holmes’ fortune based on the entire 50% stake she has in Theranos – the blood testing company she founded in 2003 with a plan to revolutionize the testing field.

Theranos shares are not traded on any stock exchange. Instead, in 2014, private investors bought the company’s stock at a price assuming a company value of $9 billion.

However, in early February 2015, investigative reporter John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal had some information about Theranos and he then contacted a former laboratory director at Theranos, who spoke to him. about unethical and harmful practices at the company.

At the time, Theranos was operating at a more limited capacity, producing misleading and unreliable results for patients. The company even thought about running an HIV test based on its technology before the former lab director talked to the CEO and Balwani.

However, scientists have begun to raise some questions about the company’s technologies, and reporter Carreyrou reveals the story of the investigation against Theranos’ blood-testing technology.

Since then, Theranos has repeatedly faced a series of legal indictments, when the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) tested the lab and said the company was shipping a “medical device”. economy is not clear”. The health and wellness center cited concerns that one of Theranos’ labs poses “immediate risk” to patients.

Lawsuits began to arise, and Theranos even had to refund millions of dollars to patients who had been tested. By the end of 2017, Theranos needed additional cash and had entered into an agreement with Fortress Investment Group for the amount of USD 100 million to support debts that will be guaranteed to be paid in 2018. As of August 2018, due to not being able to continue to hold the company declared bankruptcy.

Holmes settled a civil lawsuit with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in March 2018, while former Theranos Chairman Ramesh “Sunny’ ‘Balwani, Holmes’ one-time partner, was also implicated in several lawsuits. The two even faced separate criminal cases, however, Holmes’ trial was postponed three times due to the Covid-19 pandemic and once because of her pregnancy. The latest trial for this case is on August 31.

Prosecutors said evidence in the case showed that Holmes and Balwani had made bold promises about their blood-testing machines but were true.

Trial aside, Bloomberg believes that the mystery in this story lies in how Holmes and Balwani managed to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from investors for a completely fraudulent idea like so. The rise and fall of Holmes, a Stanford dropout, has been the subject of countless stories in magazines, books, documentaries, podcasts, and even feature films.

While Theranos documents and inside information unearthed in the lawsuits give a partial account of what happened at the startup, how Holmes attracted such interest from statesmen like Henry Kissinger and George Shultz remains an open question.