Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 to build Theranos, a blood-testing startup that claimed its proprietary technology could run hundreds of diagnostic tests from a single fingertip prick — a breakthrough that attracted $700 million in investment and a $9 billion valuation. The technology never worked as promised: Theranos was quietly running most of its tests on conventional third-party machines, and the results it did generate were dangerously unreliable — putting real patients at risk based on flawed data. Holmes was convicted of fraud in 2022 and sentenced to over 11 years in federal prison, closing one of Silicon Valley’s most cautionary stories about the cost of faking it until you make it.
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