The founder of the blood-testing company Theranos was convicted in 2022 of defrauding investors and acquitted of defrauding patients. She is serving a federal prison sentence in Texas and maintains she did nothing wrong.
You Can See Everything, a documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim distributed by A24, opened in U.S. theaters on Oct. 16, 2026, and took in an estimated $15 million on 855 screens its first weekend, the Associated Press reported.98 Holmes and her partner let a film crew into their home in the weeks before she reported to prison in 2023, and in the film she maintains that she did nothing wrong, according to the AP and Fortune.96 Filmmaker Errol Morris, who directed Theranos's commercials, told Variety he has about two hours of unreleased interview footage of Holmes filmed then and may release it, Entertainment Weekly reported.5 She is scheduled to move to a Texas halfway house in August 2027; the Bureau of Prisons lists her projected release as Feb. 22, 2030.117 Her clemency request was still listed as pending in late October 2026.4
Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 and was its chief executive until 2018, according to the Ninth Circuit’s statement of facts.1 The company said it could run fast, accurate blood tests on a drop of blood from a fingerstick.1 Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani joined in 2009, became president and chief operating officer, and oversaw the lab that tested patient samples; the court found that both were informed about the company’s finances.1 Theranos entered a partnership with Walgreens in 2010 and launched publicly in the fall of 2013.1 NPR reported that the company was valued at more than $9 billion before 2015, when the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of reports on it.26
A federal grand jury indicted Holmes and Balwani on June 14, 2018, and the indictment was superseded twice in 2020.2 As described by the Ninth Circuit, it charged a conspiracy to defraud investors (Count 1), a conspiracy to defraud patients (Count 2), six counts of wire fraud against investors (Counts 3 to 8) and four counts of wire fraud against patients (Counts 9 to 12).1 Three months earlier, the Securities and Exchange Commission had charged Holmes, Balwani and Theranos with civil fraud, alleging they raised more than $700 million from investors while making exaggerated or false statements about the company’s technology, business and financial performance.3
The Ninth Circuit’s opinion summarizes the evidence at trial on four subjects.1
The technology. Theranos’s miniaturized analyzer, the Edison, was the only device of its own that the company ever used to test patient samples, and of about 300 small-sample tests Theranos developed, only twelve were run on it, the court wrote.1 Other tests were run on third-party machines, some of them modified.1 Investors testified that they were led to believe all testing used Theranos-made devices, and the court described demonstrations for visiting investors that ran a “null protocol” while some samples were sent to third-party machines.1 The SEC alleged that most patient tests were run on other manufacturers’ commercial analyzers.3
The pharmaceutical reports. According to the opinion, Holmes personally put the logos of Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Schering-Plough on reports with favorable conclusions about Theranos’s technology, and representatives of those companies testified that they had not validated the technology or authorized the use of their logos.1 At trial, Holmes admitted adding the logos without the companies’ permission and said she regretted it, NPR reported.27
The military. The court wrote that Holmes told investors in December 2013 about work with special operations forces and a “distributed system” for remote areas.1 Gen. James Mattis testified that the Edison was never fielded by the military, used on medevac helicopters or used on the battlefield.1 Investor Brian Grossman testified that, before he invested, Holmes and Balwani told him Theranos had generated $200 million in revenue from the Department of Defense.1 The SEC alleged that Theranos’s technology was never deployed by the Defense Department and that the company had “a little more than $100,000 in revenue” in 2014.3
The finances and Walgreens. Theranos had no revenue in 2012 or 2013 and net losses of $57 million and $92 million, the court wrote, but investors were shown projections of profits instead; investor Lisa Peterson testified that documents she received showed a projected profit of $230 million by the end of 2015.1 A Walgreens representative testified that the partnership was contracting at the time Holmes and Balwani were telling investors it was expanding.1
In late 2015, federal regulators at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services inspected the Theranos lab, and their January 2016 report found deficiencies that “presented ‘immediate jeopardy’ to patient health,” including quality-control failures on Edison tests and tests run on modified third-party devices.1 Dr. Kingshuk Das testified that the company voided all patient tests run on the Edison.1 Investors testified that in 2016 Holmes “downplayed” the inspection.1
The government also charged Holmes with defrauding patients. Patients testified at trial to receiving incorrect HIV and pregnancy results, according to the Ninth Circuit.1 The jury acquitted Holmes of the conspiracy to defraud patients and of three counts of wire fraud against patients, and the government dismissed the fourth patient count during trial.12 She stands convicted only of defrauding investors.
Holmes testified in her own defense for more than 20 hours, NPR reported.26 She blamed lab directors for problems with the technology and testified that Balwani oversaw the financial forecasts.26 She expressed remorse and said she wished she had handled some matters differently.26
She also testified that Balwani, her former romantic partner, had sexually and emotionally abused her and controlled her during their relationship, and that this clouded her judgment, according to NPR.2726 Balwani has denied her allegations through his lawyer.2725 No court has made findings on them. The trial court had separated the two defendants’ trials on the basis of her disclosure of these allegations, the Ninth Circuit noted.1
On Jan. 3, 2022, after a trial of nearly four months in San Jose and more than 50 hours of deliberation over seven days, the jury of eight men and four women returned its verdicts, NPR reported.26 It convicted Holmes on Count 1, the conspiracy to defraud investors, and on Counts 6, 7 and 8, wire fraud against investors who bought Theranos’s C-2 shares in 2014.1 The opinion names the investors in those counts as Brian Grossman (Count 6), Lisa Peterson (Count 7) and Daniel Mosley (Count 8).1 The U.S. Attorney’s Office says the convictions involve wire transfers of more than $140 million.2 The jury acquitted her of the four patient counts and could not reach verdicts on Counts 3, 4 and 5, which involved investors Alan Eisenman, Chris Lucas and John Bryan Tolbert.12
Balwani was tried separately, and on July 7, 2022, his jury convicted him on all 12 counts, including the patient counts.251
Prosecutors asked for 15 years; the defense asked for no more than 18 months, arguing that house arrest and community service would be enough, ABC News reported.23 On Nov. 18, 2022, Judge Edward J. Davila sentenced Holmes to 135 months in prison and three years of supervised release, with no fine.2 He found a loss of $120 million and ten or more victims, giving a guidelines range of 135 to 168 months, according to the Ninth Circuit.1 Balwani was sentenced on Dec. 7, 2022, to 155 months.2
In May 2023 the court ordered about $452 million in restitution, for which Holmes and Balwani are jointly and severally liable: $397 million to twelve investors identified at sentencing and $54.5 million to Safeway and Walgreens.221 The same day, the Ninth Circuit denied her request to remain free while she appealed.22
On Feb. 24, 2025, a Ninth Circuit panel of Judges Mary M. Schroeder, Jacqueline H. Nguyen and Ryan D. Nelson affirmed both defendants’ convictions, sentences and the restitution order, in an opinion by Judge Nguyen.1 The court found that parts of the testimony of Dr. Kingshuk Das, Dr. Adam Rosendorff and Dr. Mark Pandori were expert opinion admitted in error, but held the errors harmless, and it held that the regulators’ report was properly admitted as evidence of Holmes’s knowledge and intent, with a limiting instruction.1 It held that the district court should have credited the remaining value of the victims’ shares in setting restitution, but that the error was harmless because the victims could not sell them.1 In May 2025 the panel denied her petition for rehearing, and no judge requested a vote on rehearing by the full court.18
On March 26, 2026, Judge Davila reduced her sentence by one year, to about 10¼ years, under a retroactive 2023 change to the sentencing guidelines for defendants with no prior criminal record.1415 The government opposed the reduction, arguing that defrauding twelve investors of more than $450 million amounted to “substantial financial hardship,” which would have made her ineligible.15 The judge disagreed, writing that “there must be some individualized finding that a victim’s loss substantially harmed that victim,” and added, “this sentence reduction does not diminish the enormity of Holmes’s crimes.”1514
Holmes left Stanford University and founded Theranos at 19, NPR reported.2623 She testified at trial that she was raped as a Stanford student and that this led her to leave the university, and that she made Theranos her consuming focus afterward, according to NPR.27 She testified that soon after leaving Stanford she began a relationship with Balwani, who is nearly 20 years older, and that she ended it after he left Theranos around May 2016.27 Forbes cut its estimate of her net worth from $4.5 billion to zero in 2016, ABC News reported.23
Her defense filed about 130 letters of support before sentencing, from family, friends and some former colleagues.24 Her partner, whom she met in 2017, wrote that they had a 14-month-old son and that she was pregnant again.24 A writer who works with sexual-assault survivors said Holmes had volunteered some 500 hours on a statewide sexual-assault helpline.24 ABC News reported that an aunt who had invested in Theranos wrote that she should serve time; that letter was submitted by the government.24 At sentencing, Holmes quoted the poet Rumi: “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”23 She now has two children, according to the Associated Press.9
No mental-health testimony or court findings about her health appear in the sources reviewed.
Holmes reported to Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a minimum-security women’s facility in Texas, on May 30, 2023, after the court moved her surrender date from April 27 at her lawyers’ request to arrange medical and child-care matters.2122 In a 2025 interview with People magazine, reported by ABC7, she said she works as a re-entry clerk for women about to be released, earning 31 cents an hour, attends weekly therapy for post-traumatic stress and continues to write patent applications for new inventions.20 “I’m not the same person I was back then,” she said.20
In 2025 she asked the president to commute her sentence; the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney listed the request as pending in January 2026 and again in late October 2026.164 A post on her X account said, “We are continuing to fight for my innocence,” Fortune reported; the account’s biography says its posts are “Mostly my words, posted by others.”17
When released, she is to live in Austin, Texas, under supervision by the U.S. Probation Office there, ABC7 reported.13 No statement from the investors named in the counts of conviction appears in the sources reviewed.
Prosecutors argued that Holmes and Balwani misled investors about Theranos's technology, its work with the military and pharmaceutical companies, and its finances.1 After the verdict the U.S. Attorney's Office said, "The guilty verdicts in this case reflect Ms. Holmes' culpability in this large-scale investor fraud."26 Prosecutors sought a 15-year sentence, and in 2026 opposed a reduction, arguing that she "still has not accepted responsibility" and "has paid minimal restitution."2315
Holmes maintains that she did nothing wrong.9 In a 2025 interview with People magazine she said, "Theranos failed. But failure is not fraud."20 On appeal, her lawyers argued that the trial court wrongly admitted testimony from former employees and a regulator's report; after the panel ruled, they called its opinion "flawed."1918
Holmes founds Theranos.1
Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani joins Theranos; he becomes president and chief operating officer.1
Theranos launches publicly in partnership with Walgreens.1
Theranos sells its C-2 round of shares; the three wire-fraud convictions involve investors in this round.1
Federal regulators issue a report finding deficiencies in the Theranos lab.1
The SEC charges Holmes, Balwani and Theranos; Holmes settles.3
A federal grand jury indicts Holmes and Balwani.2
The jury convicts Holmes on four investor counts and acquits her on four patient counts.262
A separate jury convicts Balwani on all 12 counts.25
Judge Davila sentences Holmes to 135 months.2
Holmes reports to Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas.21
The Ninth Circuit affirms the convictions, sentences and restitution.1
Judge Davila reduces her sentence by one year under a retroactive guidelines change.1415
The documentary You Can See Everything, filmed with her participation in 2023, opens in theaters.910
Holmes is scheduled to move to the Austin Transitional Center, a halfway house in Del Valle, Texas, on Aug. 23, 2027, and her projected release from federal custody is Feb. 22, 2030, according to a federal prisons letter to victims reported in September 2026; the Bureau of Prisons listed the same release date in October 2026.11127 She would then be supervised by the U.S. Probation Office in Austin.13 Her clemency request was still listed as pending by the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney in late October 2026; the White House does not comment on clemency requests, and the sources reviewed report no decision.16174 The sources reviewed report no petition to the U.S. Supreme Court after the Ninth Circuit denied rehearing.