Back then, Theranos was a revolutionary idea thought up by a woman hailed as a genius who styled herself as a female Steve Jobs. Holmes was the world's youngest female self-made billionaire, and Theranos was one of Silicon Valley's unicorn startups.
Then it all came crashing down.
The shortcomings and inaccuracies of Theranos's technology were exposed, along with the role Holmes played in covering it all up. Theranos and Holmes were charged with massive fraud, and the company was forced to close its labs and testing centers.
Last June, Theranos announced Holmes was stepping down as CEO, and the Justice Department announced that a grand jury had indicted Holmes and former Theranos president and COO Sunny Balwani for "alleged wire fraud schemes." Then, in September, Theranos announced it planned to shut down for good after it finished repaying its creditors.
This is how Holmes went from precocious child, to ambitious Stanford dropout, to an embattled startup founder charged with fraud.
Elizabeth Holmes was born on February 3, 1984 in Washington, D.C. Her mom, Noel, was a Congressional committee staffer, and her dad, Christian Holmes, worked for Enron before moving to government agencies like USAID.
Holmes family moved when she was young, from Washington, D.C. to Houston.
When she was 7, Holmes tried to invent her own time machine, filling up an entire notebook with detailed engineering drawings.
At the age of 9, Holmes told relatives she wanted to be a billionaire when she grew up. Her relatives described her as saying it with the "utmost seriousness and determination."
That same year, Holmes wrote a letter to her father: "What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn't know was possible to do."
Holmes had an "intense competitive streak" from a young age. She often played Monopoly with her younger brother and cousin, and she would insist on playing until the end, collecting the houses and hotels until she won.
If Holmes was losing, she would often storm off. More than once, she ran directly through a screen on the door.
It was during high school that Holmes developed her work ethic, often staying up late to study. She quickly became a straight-A student, and even started her own business: she sold C++ compilers, a type of software that translates computer code, to Chinese schools.
Holmes started taking Mandarin lessons, and part-way through high school, talked her way into being accepted by Stanford Universitys summer program, which culminated in a trip to Beijing.
Inspired by her great-great-grandfather Christian Holmes, a surgeon, Holmes decided she wanted to go into medicine. But she discovered early on that she was terrified of needles. Later, she said this influenced her to start Theranos.
Holmes went to Stanford to study chemical engineering. When she was a freshman, she became a "presidents scholar," an honor which came with a $3,000 stipend to go toward a research project.
Holmes spent the summer after her freshman year interning at the Genome Institute in Singapore. She got the job partly because she spoke Mandarin.
As a sophomore, Holmes went to one of her professors, Channing Robertson, and said: "Lets start a company." With his blessing, she founded Real-Time Cures, later changing the companys name to Theranos.
Thanks to a typo, early employees paychecks actually said "Real-Time Curses."
Holmes soon filed a patent application for "Medical device for analyte monitoring and drug delivery," a wearable device that would administer medication, monitor patients blood, and adjust the dosage as needed.
Anukool Manoton/Shutterstock
By the next semester, Holmes had dropped out of Stanford altogether, working on Theranos in the basement of a college house.
Theranoss business model was based around the idea that it ran blood tests using proprietary technology that required only a finger pinprick and a small amount of blood. Holmes said the tests would be able to detect medical conditions like cancer and high cholesterol.
Steve Jennings/Getty Images
Holmes started raising venture capital money for Theranos from prominent investors like Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, the father of a childhood friend and the founder of prominent VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. To date, Theranos has raised more than $700 million, and Draper has continued to defend Holmes and Theranos even after she was charged with "massive fraud."
Holmes took investors money on the condition that she wouldnt have to reveal how Theranos technology worked. Plus, she would have final say over everything having to do with the company.
That obsession with secrecy extended to every aspect of Theranos. For the first decade Holmes spent building her company, Theranos operated in stealth mode. She even took three former Theranos employees to court, claiming they had misused Theranos trade secrets.
Holmes attitude toward secrecy was borrowed from a Silicon Valley hero of hers: Steve Jobs. Holmes started wearing black turtlenecks like Jobs, decorated her office with his favorite furniture, and like Jobs, never took vacations.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Even Holmess uncharacteristically deep voice may have been part of a carefully crafted image intended to help her fit in in the male-dominated business world.
Holmes was a demanding boss, and wanted her employees to work as hard as she did. She had her assistants track when employees arrived and left each day. To encourage people to work longer hours, she started having dinner catered around 8 PM each night.
Shortly after Holmes dropped out of Stanford at age 19, she had been dating Theranos president and COO Sunny Balwani, who was 20 years her senior.
Holmes first met Balwani during her third year at Stanfords summer Mandarin program, the summer before she went to college. She was bullied by some of the other students, and Balwani had come to her aid.
Balwani became Holmes' No. 2 at Theranos despite having little experience. He was said to be a bully, and often tracked his employees' whereabouts.
Holmes and Balwani broke up in spring 2016 when Holmes pushed him out of the company.
In 2008, the Theranos board decided to remove Holmes as CEO in favor of someone more experienced. But over the course of a two-hour meeting, Holmes convinced them to let her keep her company.
As Theranos started to rake in millions of funding, Holmes became the subject of media attention and acclaim in the tech world. She graced the covers of Fortune and Forbes, gave a TED Talk, and spoke on panels with Bill Clinton and Alibabas Jack Ma.
Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Theranos quickly began securing outside partnerships. Capital Blue Cross and Cleveland Clinic signed on to offer Theranos tests to their patients, and Walgreens made a deal to open Theranos testing centers. Theranos also formed a secret partnership with Safeway worth $350 million.
Melia Robinson/Tech Insider
In 2011, Holmes hired her younger brother, Christian, to work at Theranos. Christian Holmes didnt have a medical or science background hed worked as an analyst in Washington, DC, after graduating from Duke University.
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Christian Holmes spent his early days at Theranos reading about sports online and recruiting his Duke fraternity brother to join the company. People called Holmes and his crew the "Frat Pack" and "Therabros."
At one point, Holmes was the worlds youngest self-made female billionaire with a net-worth of around $4.5 billion.
Kimberly White/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize
Holmes was obsessed with security at Theranos. She asked anyone who visited the companys headquarters to sign non-disclosure agreements before being allowed in the building, and had security guards escort visitors everywhere, even to the bathroom.
Holmes hired bodyguards to drive her around in a black Audi sedan. Her nickname was Eagle One. The windows in her office had bulletproof glass.
Around the same time, questions were being raised about Theranos technology. Ian Gibbons chief scientist at Theranos and one of the companys first hires warned Holmes that the tests werent ready for the public to take, and that there were inaccuracies in the technology. Outside scientists began voicing their concerns about Theranos, too.
Melia Robinson/Tech Insider
By August 2015, the FDA began investigating Theranos, and regulators from the government body that oversees laboratories found "major inaccuracies" in the testing Theranos was doing on patients.
By October 2015, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published his investigation into Theranoss struggles with its technology. Carreyrous reporting sparked the beginning of the companys downward spiral.
Carreyrou found that Theranos blood-testing machine, named Edison, couldnt give accurate results, so Theranos was running its samples through the same machines used by traditional blood-testing companies.
Holmes appeared on CNBCs "Mad Money" to defend herself and her company. "This is what happens when you work to change things, and first they think youre crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world," Holmes said.
By 2016, the FDA, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and SEC were all looking into Theranos.
In July 2016, Holmes was banned from the lab-testing industry for two years. By October, Theranos had shut down lab operations and wellness centers.
In March 2018, Theranos, Holmes, and Balwani were charged with "massive fraud" by the SEC. Holmes agreed to give up financial and voting control of the company, pay a $500,000 fine, and return 18.9 million shares of Theranos stock. She also isnt allowed to be the director or officer of a publicly traded company for 10 years.
Despite the charges, Holmes was allowed to stay on as CEO of Theranos, as its a private company. But the company has been hanging on by a thread, and Holmes wrote to investors asking for more money to save Theranos. "In light of where we are, this is no easy ask," Holmes wrote.
Kimberly White/Getty Images for Fortune
On Friday, June 15th, Theranos announced that Holmes was stepping down as CEO. On the same day, the Justice Department announced that a federal grand jury had indicted Holmes, along with her former partner Balwani, in alleged connection to "wire fraud schemes."
In September, Theranos sent an email to shareholders announcing that the company was shutting down. According to The Wall Street Journal, Theranos said it planned to spend the next few months repaying creditors with its remaining resources.
Maya Kosoff contributed to an earlier version of this story.
SEE ALSO: Leaked video shows Theranos employees playing the video game they created where you shoot at the reporter who exposed the startup's problems
