Elizabeth Holmes Tried to Change the World and Was Convicted of Fraud

I wondered if my text exchanges were like hers

I was addicted to following the Elizabeth Holmes trial. Holmes, nicknamed The Dropout, was a young, health-tech entrepreneur who left Stanford to found Theranos in 2003, a company she claimed built technology to revolutionize blood testing.

A charismatic and passionate leader, Holmes convinced very rich and powerful funders to invest in her company and even struck a deal with pharma giant Walgreens to deploy Theranos’s technology in their stores. In 2015, Forbes Magazine named her the youngest and wealthiest self-made billionaire.

When she was 18, before she entered Stanford, she met Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. Nineteen years her senior, Balwani became Holmes’s secret lover and her business partner. The couple lived together in a multi-million dollar house while they worked together, building an incredibly lucrative, and dangerously fraudulent, company.

It all fell apart in 2015, with the release of a Wall Street Journal article exposing Theranos for misleading investors, business partners, and the general public. Holmes fired Balwani, the couple broke up, and the company dissolved in 2018.

Intimate exchanges between the power couple were recounted in 2017 SEC depositions and are presently articles of evidence in Holmes’s fraud trial.

Hundreds of text exchanges between Holmes and Balwani offer a window into the simple, daily discourse of a couple. Their exchanges demonstrate the strength of their faith, their support of one another, their deep commitment to Theranos to their concerns and their fears over a business fraught with problems.

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