1 case tagged “startup fraud”
Convicted: Elizabeth Anne Holmes
Three weeks after a California jury found her guilty of federal fraud, Elizabeth Holmes had a one-way plane ticket to Mexico. The flight was booked for January 26, 2022. It was only canceled after prosecutors flagged the booking to her defense counsel. This was the woman Forbes had once called the youngest self-made female billionaire in America, worth an estimated $4.5 billion. The woman who had convinced Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, and Rupert Murdoch to stake their reputations on a technology company she founded at nineteen with her college tuition money. The woman who had promised to revolutionize medicine with a single drop of blood. By the time Holmes walked into Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas on May 30, 2023, her net worth was effectively zero. She now earns 31 cents an hour as a prison law clerk, helping fellow inmates write resumes. She is 41 years old, the mother of two young children, and confined to a minimum-security facility 95 miles from the city where she grew up. This is the story of how Elizabeth Holmes built one of the most audacious frauds in American corporate history, sustained it for years behind a black turtleneck and a practiced baritone voice, and ultimately couldn't outrun it. Not even with a one-way ticket.
