Elizabeth Holmes

Have you ever heard of a scam called Theranos? Theranos was founded by Elizabeth Holmes in 2003. It was a company meant to give people an affordable, painless, and quicker way of getting lab information, like cancer or hepatitis. Theranos’s prices ranged from $1.55 – $117.96, while labs from Quest or LabCorp varied from $108 – $1139, so people were very interested in Theranos. Instead of the usual way of getting a shot in the arm, it would only be a little from your finger. Doctors wouldn’t get the results, it was sent directly to you. It didn’t work like typical labs, so doctors never truly trusted it.

Elizabeth would go on multiple interviews and talk shows and be convincing with how well her product worked. She was very vague when she talked about the company, never really discussed how the product worked and focused on telling people about the mission statements. She was extremely secretive with the details, but managed to get 400 million from investors, meet many other successful people like Biden, Zuckerberg, & and Musk, and create a partnership with Walgreens to offer testing in their stores. Holmes claimed the secrecy was to prevent the other big corps from taking her idea, but she struggled to get the product FDA-approved because she would avoid mentioning certain things, but eventually, she managed. The actuality of the company is that workers had to sign an NDA to prevent talking about what happens in the workplace to anyone, including family.

The lab machines also would glitch but still used them for consumers’ results, knowing it didn’t work. Blood would mix in machines, people would get results saying they have cancer when they don’t and they wouldn’t understand the results and would search it up on Google, spreading more misinformation. They would immediately schedule appointments with their doctors and see if the results were accurate. This is why doctors never recommended Theranos because they weren’t transparent enough to trust them to their patients. The labs would be so disorganized that the fast results they promoted no longer occurred. Theranos promised consumers things that also no longer happened like they rarely prickled fingers anymore and started taking blood the traditional way. They promised 99% percent accuracy when it was only 44%. Theranos did not work, never did and employees would quit because they didn’t find what they were doing to be moral anymore.

Elizabeth was a Stanford dropout who was very optimistic. She would ask questions to her professor that were completely unrealistic and move on to someone else who could believe her. In the beginning of Theranos, the guy who helped her create it felt that the product wasn’t stable enough, but Elizabeth dismissed him. In fear of being fired, he ended his life. Other employees would approach her and tell her that the product should be adjusted to work better, but would just be dismissed and quit. One of the ex-employees was in contact with a reporter, once Theranos found out he and his family had fought $400,000 in legal fees for years. Another ex-employee reached out to health regulators and reported Theranos to them. Eventually, an article was released and they began investigating Theranos to confirm its credibility, to find out it was a sham and Theranos had to pay back investors and close indefinitely. Elizabeth Holmes is currently in jail for 11 years for fraud.

Theranos was a billion-dollar company that managed to be extremely successful and lied to people for years. It’s crazy how many people were willing to put their trust in a company that never showed how their product worked. Even the military was interested in incorporating her product, but they wanted to test the product themselves and Elizabeth wouldn’t permit it. She missed out on millions and that was the biggest red flag. That’s why it’s important not to take the easy way out because sometimes it’s not the right way. The company had the right idea but it wasn’t incorporated correctly.