She, a woman with pants
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleged that Holmes and the former president of Theranos, Ramesh Balwani, made a series of false statements and mock presentations to investors, product samples and interviews.The regulator also argued that the company's technology was never used by the US Department of Defense and that generated profits of little more than US $ 100,000 in 2014, as opposed to the more than US $ 100 million that Theranos had estimated to win that year.
According to the SEC, Theranos could only analyze a small number of tests and the company conducted the vast majority of analyzes on commercially modified machines. However, Holmes is not exempt from facing criminal charges in the future.
Elizabeth Holmes, barely 9 years old, wrote to her father a letter in which she said that she wanted for her life to discover something new, something that humanity believed incapable of doing. In an interview to be held in 2015, Holmes spoke of that letter, when Forbes magazine named her the youngest multimillionaire entrepreneur in the world, with a fortune valued at US $ 4,500 million.
At that time, the 31-year-old woman was emerging as a revolutionary in biotechnology, a woman with all the conditions to change the way blood tests are done all over the world. Three years later, Holmes is about to lose control of his own company and has been accused of cheating investors who bet more than $ 700 million on his project. The signal was made by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which announced that it had reached an agreement with Holmes and Theranos, the company it founded, after an investigation into the offer and sale of values of the company between 2013 and 2015.
The SEC concluded that Theranos tricked investors into the technology it developed and falsely claimed that its products had been used by the US military. in Afghanistan.As a consequence, Holmes will be corrected with $ 500,000 and will not be able to work as a director or worker of any company listed on the stock exchange for the next 10 years.
The young woman left the prestigious Stanford University to pursue her dream of starting a biotechnology company. At the age of 19, he founded Theranos, in 2003, with the aim of developing an innovative device to perform blood tests.Theranos set itself the goal of making blood tests simpler, available at all times and cheap. Under this premise he developed a method with which a little more than a drop of blood was enough to perform a quick analysis and with confidential results.
The advances achieved added to the company a powerful portfolio of new investors that made the value of the company grow to US $ 9,000 million. The company came to have one of the most recognized directories in the United States, including former US Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, in addition to a former Secretary of Defense of that country.