I’ve finally figured out what Elizabeth Holmes’s voice reminds me of. Watch any interview she gave as the founder of Theranos and you’ll agree she sounds

 who has just taken an enormous bong hit. Whenever she spoke to journalists about how brilliant she was or denied anything was amiss at her wonky blood testing startup, she adopted the strange habit of speaking at a low pitch – only occassionally slipping into her genuine, higher, more feminine style. It sounds remarkably like she has huffed

 and is losing a battle to croak out the rest of her sentence before coughing her lungs out.

This was part of Holmes’s scrupulous attempts to cultivate her public image — an extreme example of the fake-it-till-you-make-it mindset, completed by an unblinking, Zuckerbergish stare and a Jobsian black turtleneck. When her fraud trial in San Jose kicks off in earnest next week, it will be fascinating to see what version of Holmes takes the stand.

Elizabeth Holmes arrives at her landmark trial last year — sans trademark black poloneck


ast year, as trial preparations were underway, it emerged that Holmes was exploring a “mental disease” defence. The trial itself has been delayed by her pregnancy – she gave birth to a baby boy in September, having married husband Billy Evans, heir to the Evans Hotel Group fortune, in 2019. The publication of legal papers last week also suggested that Holmes, 37, plans to argue that her judgment was impaired by the “manipulation” of her ex-partner, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the chief operating officer of Theranos. Balwani, 56, denied accusations that he was sexually abusive, controlled Holmes’s spending, diet, wardrobe, sleep, and threw “hard, sharp objects at her”. He faces his own fraud trial next year.

Holmes was once the youngest self-made billionaire in the world, boasting a startup valued at $9 billion and the prestige of revolutionising healthcare. How did she fall so far from grace?

First, some background. Holmes had told her investors – who gave her $700 million – that she had invented a pin prick blood test to quickly check for diseases. An amazing innovation, it promised to replace the more painful, time-consuming and expensive intravenous needle. She even claimed, somewhat improbably, that the money she was earning from selling her dodgy products to supermarkets and pharmacies didn’t matter to her. “What matters is how well we do in trying to make people’s lives better,” she said.

Holmes poses with the minute blood capsule that she claimed would revolutionise first health — and then the world


The truth was that she was not making people’s lives better. At all. It took the dogged reporting of John Carreyrou at the 

 to uncover the incredible details that the blood testing kits made by Theranos were faulty; that most of their tests were done using conventional lab equipment; and that their first customers were given false positives for all kinds of nasty diseases.

At the start, Holmes came out swinging, telling a news channel: “This is what happens when you work to change things. First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, then all of a sudden you change the world.” She hired lawyers to lean on the WSJ, and dispatched private investigators to hound whistleblower employees. An all-hands meeting saw a chant break out – “fuck you, Carreyrou!” – and some employees designed a 

-style video game where they shot pictures of the reporter’s face. Making people’s lives better, indeed.

"First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, then all of a sudden you change the world."

It’s not that there weren’t doubts circulating during Theranos’s glory days. Holmes once gave a comically inept answer to a 

 interviewer about how her blood testing machine works: “A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs.” Medical experts told her, before she dropped out of Stanford, that her idea wouldn’t take off because the blood sample you get from a needle is different from a finger prick, which also contains tissue fluid. Google Ventures smelled a rat and didn’t invest when a venture capitalist was dispatched to a Theranos testing centre and noticed that instead of a quick and easy pinprick, he had to roll up his sleeve to donate several samples of blood with a needle.

But Holmes was rubbing shoulders with the best and brightest names in America, which must have helped to quash any rumours that Theranos was too good to be true. Barack and Michelle Obama hosted Holmes for a state dinner at the White House – Joe Biden, vice president at the time, also sang her praises. Two former or future secretaries of defence, two former secretaries of state – including Henry Kissinger – sat on her board alongside the bluest chip names in business, healthcare, and the military. Rupert Murdoch, Betsy DeVos, and the Walton family, who founded Walmart, invested north of $100 million each.

What exactly caused Theranos to implode so spectacularly, and the extent to which it tried to cover up its failed technology will emerge in the coming weeks. Witnesses set to take the stand include doctors who used Theranos equipment, and patients who were mistakenly given positive test results for cancer and HIV.

Ahead of her trial, Holmes asked the judge in her case to prohibit prosecutors from including evidence of her “wealth, spending, and lifestyle”. Her lawyers argue that her decisions to spend investor money on a luxury SUV, an expensive house, and designer merch, as well as using her assistants to run personal errands are not evidence of wrongdoing. She denies ten counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud that defrauded investors, doctors, and patients. If found guilty, she could face 20 years in prison.

Before the fall: Holmes on the cover of Forbes Magazine, 2014


Whatever the outcome of the trial, the Theranos legacy has already been cemented. It is now a byword for Silicon Valley magic bean guff which in exchange for millions of dollars, promises to change the world, delivers a half-arsed version, and pockets the difference. It is the yardstick by which all cretinous startups are now judged – ideas to bottle sewagey “raw water” or squeeze juice with pointless WiFi-enabled machinery or create fingerprint-activated smart locks that can be undone with screwdrivers all pale in comparison to the investment black hole of Theranos.

A fawning reporter once profiled Holmes, when she was at the peak of her career, breathlessly proclaiming: “For as much promise as those tiny samples hold, Holmes is already known as a very real and a very rare example of what perseverance makes possible.” How right she was.

A scandal of biblical proportions: inside the Vatican&#8217;s landmark corruption trial

What next for Sam Bankman-Fried? 

The best private members' clubs in New York

Pavilion Knightsbridge: A stylish bolthole for the discerning businessman