When Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the now-disgraced blood testing company Theranos, received the sentence for her fraud conviction in 2022, she was originally expected to serve 11 years after she reported to prison last May. But it looks like she’ll be getting out by Labor Day 2032.
NBC News noticed that her release date on the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) website has been bumped up to August 16, 2032 from December 29th. That marked another reduction after more than two years fell off her sentence last year. The outlet heard from the BOP that sometimes sentences are shortened for good behavior or the completion of certain programs designed to address mental health, financial literacy, and other factors that might reduce recidivism. Holmes’s lawyer did not respond to an NBC request for comment.
Theranos, founded in 2003 when Holmes was 19, had once promised to revolutionize the world of blood testing by reducing sample sizes from a full draw to a single pinprick. But a 2015 Wall Street Journal exposé revealed that the tests didn’t do as much as they said — and also operated similarly to normal blood tests. Before Holmes was convicted and ordered to pay $452 million in restitution, she settled a civil suit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in which the agency said she and co-founder Sunny Balwani (himself sentenced to 13 years in prison) had perpetuated a “massive fraud” on their customers and investors. Theranos shut down in 2018.
Holmes’s story, which became a cautionary tale about blind trust in charismatic Silicon Valley founders, became a pop culture sensation, inspiring a best-selling book by the journalist who broke the story of her deceptions, documentaries from ABC and HBO documentary exploring her rise-and-fall, and a Hulu series that dramatized it.