SAD: Elizabeth Holmes Was The Darling Of Silicon Valley. Now She’s Going To Jail For Her Audacious £700m Fra0d

Elizabeth Holmes was a young woman possessed of vaulting ambition. She wanted to change the world and boasted that she would do so by revolutionising global healthcare, making state-of-the art screening for numerous diseases accessible to all.

She would show how a pinprick of blood could transform medical practice.

In the event, Holmes showed only that there is no shortage of gullibility and greed among America’s great and good and super-wealthy.

Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch, former U.S. Defence Secretary James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis — America’s most feted general — and two ex-U.S. Secretaries of State, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, were among those taken in by the charismatic blonde with the piercing blue eyes, deep husky voice and astonishing powers of persuasion.

At the age of 19, Holmes had set up Theranos, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful new business ventures, raising billions of dollars and being hailed as the ‘next Steve Jobs’ after the mercurial co-founder of Apple.

Her life-changing product was a portable blood-testing machine that could quickly and cheaply screen for hundreds of diseases.

She even described it as a ‘gift from God’ although it would turn out to be little more than a box of expensive junk.

And on Monday a federal jury in San Jose, California, found Holmes guilty of four fraud charges after a four-month trial in which she was portrayed as one of the most shameless con artists of modern times. Although Holmes, 37, was acquitted on four other charges and the jury failed to reach a verdict on three, each charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, however they are likely to be served concurrently.

In finding her guilty of defrauding investors, jurors accepted the prosecution case that Holmes knowingly lied about her product — crucial to proving the fraud charges.

Holmes, who took the stand during the trial, and her legal team had tried hard to persuade jurors she had noble intentions throughout.

Her mistake, she claimed, had simply been to believe her company’s doctors and scientists when they assured her the technology worked.

As the verdicts were read out, Holmes, who gave birth to her first child last year, showed little emotion. But before leaving the court room she hugged her hotel-chain heir husband, Billy Evans, her parents and friends.

She is expected to appeal and will remain free while a sentencing date is agreed. The trial of her former business partner — and ex-lover — Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani, on similar charges will start in a few weeks.

During her trial, Holmes sensationally claimed she had gone to Balwani, 20 years her senior, for comfort after being r@ped while a student at Stanford University — only for him to subject her to emotional and $eCual abuse over many years, which she said had impaired her judgment. He has denied the claims.

Holmes’s conviction was greeted with particular relief yesterday by Rochelle Gibbons, the widow of Ian Gibbons, a Cambridge-educated British biochemist who became Theranos chief scientist in 2005.

Dr Gibbons committed suicide in 2013 convinced that Holmes was about to sack him for challenging her grandiose claims about her blood-testing machine. Following his death, Holmes never offered any condolences but simply had an underling call his widow to demand the return of company property.

‘Ian would be very happy,’ Mrs Gibbons told the Mail. ‘He was a very kind, tolerant person but he hated her so much — she was a sociopath, a narcissist, a bully and a liar. When he realised she was pushing things on patients that were fraudulent, it destroyed him.’

Mrs Gibbons knew Holmes in the early years of Theranos before she reinvented herself to appeal to would-be Silicon Valley investors — losing weight, dyeing her mousy brown hair blonde, cultivating a lower male-like voice, favouring black turtle necks as Jobs did, and developing a far more flamboyant personality. (Like the famously ascetic Jobs, she would also talk of her spartan existence, keeping little more than a mattress in her bedroom.)

While Rochelle Gibbons said she believes Holmes genuinely believed in her miracle product ‘for a very brief time’, she fatally came to fall her own hype. ‘She couldn’t escape her persona as a wunderkind and got sucked into it,’ she said.

Holmes’s story is now being made into a film starring Jennifer Lawrence and a TV mini-series with Amanda Seyfried, and it is not difficult to see why Hollywood should be enthralled by a saga that has been described as ‘Silicon Valley’s Greatest Disaster’, revealing the perils of hype and hubris in the avaricious $2.4 trillion technology industry.

Holmes was studying chemical and electrical engineering at Stanford when she launched her company after she claimed she had a brainwave one night. She envisaged a device the size of a computer printer — which she called ‘The Edison’ — that would save millions of lives.

With blood from just a single pinprick on a patient’s finger, it could rapidly analyse the sample, detecting hundreds of diseases and substances, from cancer to cocaine.

She was encouraged by ambitious parents (her father had been a director of the scandal-hit energy company Enron) who had hot-housed her as a child in Washington DC.

When, in 2003, her father found venture capitalists willing to invest in her company, Holmes dropped out of university. Confident and highly plausible, Holmes worked tirelessly to win over more backers ready to attach either their money or reputation to a venture whose astonishing claims few appeared to question.

Drawn from the highest ranks of business and government, this coterie of powerful older men proved very useful in allaying scepticism over Holmes’s lack of experience.

So what drew them to her like bees to nectar? Perhaps it was her engaging account of how she’d been inspired by her hatred of injections. Giving blood was unpleasant and testing it expensive. Her invention would make it stress-free and cheap, she said. More likely, it was charm and glamour. She effortlessly captured attention in an industry lacking both, and led by nerdy men with negligible social skills.