Desastre de 9.000 millones de dólares: cómo Elizabeth Holmes mató a Theranos en 15 años

Transcripción original en inglés. Los títulos, resúmenes y preguntas frecuentes están traducidos. Narración completa disponible vía subtítulos de YouTube en su idioma.

En 2014, Elizabeth Holmes apareció en la portada de las revistas Forbes, Fortune, Time e Inc.

Ella tenía treinta años. Theranos estaba valorada en nueve mil millones de dólares. Walgreens había acordado instalar máquinas de análisis de sangre Theranos en todas las tiendas de Estados Unidos. Henry Kissinger se sentó en su tablero.

Three years later, Theranos was worthless. Elizabeth Holmes was indicted for criminal fraud. The blood-testing technology had never actually worked. Not in 2014. Not in 2010. Not ever.

This is how a Stanford dropout convinced America that one drop of blood could replace the entire medical lab system. How she kept the lie going for thirteen years. And how thousands of patients received blood-test results that could have killed them.

Theranos raised nine hundred and forty-five million dollars from investors. The technology never produced a single reliable medical result. The company secretly ran patient blood samples on commercial machines built by Siemens, in a back room, while telling the world its proprietary device was doing the work. When concerned employees raised alarms, they were fired and gagged with non-disclosure agreements. When a Wall Street Journal reporter began asking questions, Theranos hired a former Marine general and a private detective to follow him. By the time the truth came out, hundreds of thousands of patients had received unreliable medical results. None of them ever received any restitution.

This is the story of Theranos. And how it ended.

Palo Alto, two thousand and three. A twenty-year-old Stanford chemical engineering student named Elizabeth Holmes drops out of university to start a company. The pitch is breathtaking. A single drop of blood, taken from a finger prick, will be analyzed by a small desktop device. Hundreds of medical tests. Cheaper than any lab. Faster than any clinic. Available in every drugstore in America.

Her professor, Channing Robertson, is so impressed he joins the board. Larry Ellison invests. So does Tim Draper. By two thousand and ten Theranos has raised forty-five million dollars. The device does not work.

It cannot work. The science is wrong. A single drop of blood is too small a sample for the chemistry required. Different blood tests need different reagents, different temperatures, different processing. No machine in the world can do hundreds of tests on a single drop. The Theranos engineers know this. They tell Holmes. She tells them to keep trying.

Holmes begins to assemble what people will later call her costume. She wears black turtlenecks every day, copying Steve Jobs. She lowers her speaking voice into a deep baritone that her ex-boyfriend would later testify was not her natural voice. She fixes her gaze on listeners without blinking. She gives a TED talk. She tells stories about her grandmother dying of skin cancer that her family later said never happened.

By two thousand and thirteen Theranos has a working device, called the Edison. The Edison is a desktop box with a robotic arm and a heating element. It can run a few simple blood tests. The results are inconsistent. Sometimes the machine returns a number. Sometimes it returns nothing. The same patient sample tested three times can produce three different results.

Holmes signs a partnership with Walgreens. Forty wellness centers in Arizona will offer Theranos blood tests starting that fall. The pitch to Walgreens is that the Edison runs all of it. The reality is that ninety percent of patient samples are being secretly transported to a back room at Theranos headquarters and run on commercial machines bought from Siemens.

The patients in the Walgreens stores think they are getting Theranos technology. The doctors who order the tests think the same. They are not. They are getting Siemens results, run by Theranos technicians, often diluted with saline because the finger-prick sample is too small.

The numbers are bad. A test that should read one hundred reads two hundred. A pregnancy hormone test gives false miscarriage results. A cancer marker test gives wildly elevated numbers that send healthy patients to oncologists. A potassium test reads so high a doctor calls Theranos to check if the patient is dead. Theranos voids years of test results without explanation.

Inside the company, employees who voice concerns are fired. They sign non-disclosure agreements that prohibit them from speaking to regulators. Theranos hires the law firm Boies Schiller and the litigator David Boies, the man who once represented Al Gore in Bush versus Gore. Boies sends letters to former employees threatening lawsuits if they say anything about what they saw.

In two thousand and fourteen Holmes graces the cover of Forbes magazine. She is, the headline reads, the youngest self-made female billionaire in history. The valuation is nine billion dollars. Holmes personally owns half. On paper, she is worth four point five billion dollars. Time names her one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Joe Biden visits her lab. Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, both former Secretaries of State, sit on her board. James Mattis, a future Secretary of Defense, joins them. Sam Nunn, the former Senator. William Perry, a former Defense Secretary. Theranos has more political legitimacy than most defense contractors.

Then George Shultz's grandson, Tyler, takes a job at Theranos.

Tyler Shultz is twenty-three years old. He is a Stanford biology graduate. He believes in the company because his grandfather believes in the company. He starts work in the lab. Within weeks he realizes the proficiency tests, which are supposed to validate that the lab equipment works correctly, are being manipulated. Tyler raises concerns to Holmes directly. He emails her. She does not respond. He goes to his grandfather. His grandfather sides with Holmes.

Tyler quits. He calls a Wall Street Journal reporter named John Carreyrou. He tells him everything.

Carreyrou begins reporting in early two thousand and fifteen. Theranos discovers what he is doing. They hire David Boies to threaten him. They hire a private investigator to follow him. They send people to threaten Tyler Shultz at his apartment. They threaten his parents with bankruptcy from legal fees. The Shultz family pays four hundred thousand dollars in lawyer bills defending Tyler.

On October sixteenth, two thousand and fifteen, Carreyrou's article runs on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The headline is not subtle. The technology does not work. Theranos has been running tests on commercial machines. The Edison is mostly a prop.

Holmes goes on Mad Money the next day to defend the company. She refuses to take questions about specifics. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services investigates the lab. They find the Edison's results are wrong fifty percent of the time on some critical tests. CMS revokes the lab's license and bans Holmes from operating labs for two years.

Walgreens terminates the partnership. The forty stores close. Theranos voids two full years of blood test results, approximately eight hundred and ninety thousand tests, including thousands of women who received false pregnancy or miscarriage results, and cancer patients who received misleading cancer markers. Some of them had been treated based on the wrong information.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charges Holmes with massive fraud in March of two thousand and eighteen. The Department of Justice indicts her on wire fraud charges three months later. Sunny Balwani, her secret boyfriend who had been the chief operating officer, is indicted alongside her.

Theranos dissolves in September of two thousand and eighteen. Investors lose all nine hundred and forty-five million dollars. Holmes's four point five billion dollar paper fortune evaporates entirely.

The trial begins in August of twenty twenty-one. Holmes testifies. She blames Sunny Balwani for everything. She says he controlled her, isolated her, abused her. The jury hears recorded calls. They see emails. They hear from former employees. The defense calls character witnesses including Holmes's mother.

On January third, twenty twenty-two, the jury convicts Holmes on four of eleven counts. Three counts of wire fraud. One count of conspiracy. The four counts all relate to defrauding investors. The jury splits on patient fraud charges. Some jurors believed she had defrauded patients. Others did not believe the prosecution had proven Holmes personally knew patients were being harmed.

On November eighteenth, twenty twenty-two, Holmes is sentenced to eleven years and three months in federal prison. Sunny Balwani gets twelve years and eleven months. Holmes serves her sentence at FPC Bryan in Texas. Balwani serves his at FCI Lompoc Two in California.

The patients who received bad blood test results received no restitution. None. The case did not result in a single dollar of compensation to any of the people whose medical decisions were made on the basis of fraudulent test results.

The investors recovered partial settlements through civil cases. Walgreens settled with Theranos in two thousand and twenty for forty-four million dollars on a one hundred and forty million dollar lawsuit, and recovered forty-four cents on the dollar.

The board members who lent their names to the fraud faced no consequences. Henry Kissinger died in twenty twenty-three at age one hundred. He never apologized for his role. George Shultz died in twenty twenty-one at age one hundred. He defended Holmes publicly until the bitter end. James Mattis became Secretary of Defense and is now a private equity board member. Sam Nunn writes op-eds. William Perry writes books.

The lawyer David Boies, who had threatened Tyler Shultz and the Wall Street Journal, faced no consequences. Boies Schiller is still one of the most powerful litigation firms in the country.

Stanford University, where Elizabeth Holmes was given access to professors who lent their names to her company before the technology existed, has not changed any of its disclosure policies for student-founded companies.

Channing Robertson, the professor who joined the Theranos board and helped Holmes raise her first millions on the strength of his academic reputation, retired from Stanford in twenty thirteen with full honors. He did not testify against Holmes at trial. He has not commented publicly since.

The framing of the Theranos story has shifted over time. For a while it was a cautionary tale about charisma. Then it was a documentary. Then it was a TV miniseries. Then a feature film. The general public lessons were always presented as if they were about Elizabeth Holmes personally, about a brilliant young woman who lost her way, about Silicon Valley's worship of disruption.

They are not.

What Theranos really was, was a series of decisions made by professional adults with full information.

Channing Robertson did not get tricked. He had a doctorate in chemical engineering and knew the science of blood testing. The Walgreens executives who signed the deal did not get fooled. They had medical advisors who told them the device was likely fake. The Forbes editors who put Holmes on the cover did not investigate her claims. They published a press release in editorial form. The board members who lent her their names had every incentive to perform due diligence and chose not to.

The patients who received fraudulent test results did not get to make any of these calculations. They paid for everyone else's bet. The investors did not. They sued and recovered settlements. Holmes did not. She is in a minimum-security prison and will be released in twenty thirty-two at the age of forty-nine. She is currently writing a book.

This is the receipt of Theranos. The valuation went from nine billion to zero. The founder went from Forbes cover to federal prison. The patients went from trusted medical results to uncertain medical care that some of them never recovered from. And the structures that made it all possible — the Stanford founder pipeline, the celebrity board memberships, the press coverage that copy-pasted founder claims, the dual-class share structure that gave Holmes total control — are all still standard practice in venture capital today.

A decade later, almost no laws have changed.