Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Seeks Commutation of Fraud Sentence

Holmes is serving an 11-year prison term in Texas for defrauding investors.

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes leaves federal court in San Jose, Calif., on March 17, 2023. Jeff Chiu/AP Photo

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted of conspiring to defraud investors in her now-defunct blood-testing startup, has asked President Donald Trump to commute her prison sentence, potentially cutting nearly six years off her time behind bars.

Holmes was convicted in 2022 of four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to just over 11 years in prison. Prosecutors said Holmes lied to investors from 2010 to 2015 by promising that Theranos’s technology could run many medical tests on one blood drop from a finger prick. A federal appeals court upheld her sentencing last year, citing sufficient evidence of intent to defraud.

Holmes, now 41, sought to commute her sentence in 2025, and it remains pending, according to the Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney. She is scheduled to be released from a minimum-security federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, in December 2031.

A commutation would reduce her sentence but leave intact her conviction and $452 million restitution obligation to defrauded investors. A full pardon, which Holmes has not publicly requested, would eliminate those requirements.

The Epoch Times reached out to the White House and the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney for comment, but did not receive a response by publication time.

Holmes was 19 when she founded Theranos in Palo Alto, California. With 50 percent ownership in Theranos and a net worth of $4.5 billion at the time, she was listed as the “world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire” by Forbes in 2014.

Theranos became the subject of several investigations by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) after a 2015 report by The Wall Street Journal questioned the reliability of Theranos’s test results.

The flawed technology led a patient to falsely believe she had a precursor virus to AIDs, and sent inaccurate results to pregnant women and women being screened for cancer, according to the Department of Justice.

Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos, speaks at the Clinton Global Initiative's closing session in New York City on Sept. 29, 2015. Andrew Burton/Getty Images

“Theranos itself eventually concluded a patient impact existed for every test run on patients and voided all tests with its analyzer,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California said in 2022. “The government points out that Holmes was undeterred and again choose deceit over candor by downplaying the extent of the patient impact to investor-victims and continuing forward with her elaborate fraud.”

Holmes leveraged a high-powered Theranos board that included former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who testified against her during her trial, and two former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and the late George Shultz, whose son, Alexander, submitted a statement criticizing Holmes for concocting the scheme.

Emel Akan, Reuters, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.