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Holmes was acquitted on four counts, and the jury failed to reach a ruling on all three cases.
A U.S. jury has found Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes guilty of conspiracy to defraud investors. Holmes was tried on Monday for four of the 11 offenses.
He was acquitted of four felonies, and the jury was unable to rule on three felonies.
The prosecutor said Holmes, 37, had cheated private investors between 2010 and 2015 by believing that Theranos’ small machines could perform various tests with a few drops of blood from a finger hole.
Holmes was also accused of misleading patients about the accuracy of the tests.
Holmes rose to fame in Silicon Valley after founding Theranos in 2003.
Wealthy private investors, including media mogul Rupert Murdoch, invested millions in the company after meeting with a founder who was known for his similar black collar similar to Steve Jobs.
The case sheds light on Theranos’ futile efforts to overturn laboratory tests. The company secretly relied on conventional machines manufactured by Siemens to test patients, the prosecutor said.
Theranos collapsed after the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles suggesting that his devices were faulty and inaccurate. Holmes was indicted in 2018 along with former operations director Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani Theranos.
He pleaded not guilty to nine counts of fraud and two counts of conspiracy. Balwani has also been acquitted and will be tried later.
The trial, which began in September in San Jose, California, saw the testimony of former Theranos employees, who said they had left the company after seeing problems with the technology.
Investors claimed that Holmes had made misleading claims about Theranos, such as that his machines were being used by the U.S. military in the field. And the former patients were told by the jury that they would not use Theranos ’tests if they knew the tests were flawed.
The prosecutor said if Holmes had been honest with investors and patients, the company would never have attracted critical funding and revenue.
“He chose fraud rather than business failure. He chose to be dishonest, “said U.S. Assistant Attorney General Jeff Schenk at the beginning of the closing arguments.” That choice was not only honest, it was criminal. “
Declaring his defense at trial, Holmes said he never wanted to deceive anyone and that Theranos’ lab director was concerned about the quality of the test. In his closing remarks, defense attorney Kevin Downey said the evidence did not show that Holmes was driven by Theranos’ monetary cuts, but rather that he believed he was “building a technology that would change the world.”
“You know at the first sign of trouble, the villains are making money,” but Holmes stopped, Downey said. “When he got off he got off that boat.”
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