Elizabeth Holmes will go to trial for massive fraud in 2020. Here’s a timeline of the Theranos CEO’s rise and fall, from becoming the world’s youngest female billionaire to getting charged with massive 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.”

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 University’s 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 “president’s 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: “Let’s start a company.” With his blessing, she founded Real-Time Cures, later changing the company’s 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.

By the next semester, Holmes had dropped out of Stanford altogether, and was working on Theranos in the basement of a college house.

Theranos’s business model was based around the idea that it could run 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.

Holmes started raising 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. Theranos raised more than $700 million, and Draper has continued to defend Holmes.

Holmes took investors’ money on the condition that she wouldn’t 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 and running a company was borrowed from a Silicon Valley hero of hers: former Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Holmes started dressing in black turtlenecks like Jobs, decorated her office with his favorite furniture, and like Jobs, never took vacations.

Even Holmes’s uncharacteristically deep voice may have been part of a carefully crafted image intended to help her fit in in the male-dominated business world. In ABC’s podcast on Holmes called “The Dropout,” former Theranos employees said the CEO sometimes “fell out of character,” particularly after drinking, and would speak in a higher voice.

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 to the office around 8 p.m. each night.

Shortly after Holmes dropped out of Stanford at age 19, she began dating Theranos president and COO Sunny Balwani, who was 20 years her senior. The two met during Holmes’ third year in Stanford’s 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 eventually 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 stay in charge of her company.

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 in their stores. Theranos also formed a secret partnership with Safeway worth $350 million.

In 2011, Holmes hired her younger brother, Christian, to work at Theranos, although he didn’t have a medical or science background. Christian Holmes spent his early days at Theranos reading about sports online and recruiting his Duke University fraternity brothers to join the company. People dubbed Holmes and his crew the “Frat Pack” and “Therabros.”

At one point, Holmes was the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire with a net worth of around $4.5 billion.

Holmes was obsessed with security at Theranos. She asked anyone who visited the company’s headquarters to sign non-disclosure agreements before being allowed in the building, and had security guards escort visitors everywhere — even to the bathroom.

Around the same time, questions were being raised about Theranos’ technology. Ian Gibbons — chief scientist at Theranos and one of the company’s first hires — warned Holmes that the tests weren’t ready for the public to take, and that there were inaccuracies in the technology. Outside scientists began voicing their concerns about Theranos, too.

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 Theranos’s struggles with its technology. Carreyrou’s reporting sparked the beginning of the company’s downward spiral.

Carreyrou found that Theranos’ blood-testing machine, named Edison, couldn’t give accurate results, so Theranos was running its samples through the same machines used by traditional blood-testing companies.

Holmes appeared on CNBC’s “Mad Money” shortly after the WSJ published its story to defend herself and Theranos. “This is what happens when you work to change things, and first they think you’re 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 its lab operations and wellness centers.

Despite the charges, Holmes was allowed to stay on as CEO of Theranos, since it’s a private company. The company had 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.

In Theranos’ final days, Holmes reportedly got a Siberian husky puppy named Balto that she brought into the office. However, the dog wasn’t potty trained, and would go to the bathroom inside the company’s office and during meetings.

In June 2018, Theranos announced that Holmes was stepping down as CEO. On the same day, the Department of Justice announced that a federal grand jury had charged Holmes, along with Balwani, with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Holmes is now reportedly married to Billy Evans, the heir to hospitality company Evans Hotel Group. She reportedly wears his MIT “signet ring” on a chain around her neck, and the couple posts photos on Instagram together.

On Friday, a California judge ruled that the trial for Holmes and Balwani will start in July 202. Each of them could face up to 20 years in prison, and a $250,000 fine plus restitution for each charge, the government has said.

Source: Business Insider

Maya Kosoff contributed to an earlier version of this story.