A look inside the insanely successful life of Elizabeth Holmes, the world's youngest self-made female billionaire
Elizabeth Holmes was born in February 1984. Her mom, Noel Anne, was a Congressional committee staffer, and her dad, Christian Holmes, worked for government agencies like USAID.
Holmes' family moved around a lot when she was young, from Washington, DC, to Houston, to China.
At the age of 9, Holmes wrote a letter to her father: "What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn't know was possible to do."
When she was a teenager living in China, Holmes started her own business where she sold C++ compilers to Chinese schools.
Holmes was inspired by her great-great-grandfather Christian Holmes, a surgeon, to go into medicine, but she discovered she was terrified of needles. Later, this would influence her to start Theranos.
Holmes went to Stanford to study chemical engineering. When she was a freshman, she became a President's Scholar, an honor which came with a $3,000 stipend to go towards a research project.
Within a year she had filed a patent application for "Medical device for analyte monitoring and drug delivery," a wearable device that monitored patients' blood and administrated medicine.
As a sophomore, Holmes went to one of her professors, Channing Robertson, and told him: "Let's start a company." With his blessing, she founded Real-Time Cures, later changing the company's name to Theranos.
She dropped out of Stanford a semester later, working on Theranos in the basement of a college house.
For the first decade Holmes spent building her company, Theranos operated in stealth mode. She even took three former Theranos employees to court, where she claimed they had misused Theranos trade secrets.
Theranos develops blood tests that detect medical conditions, like cancer and high cholesterol. Instead of using a needle, Theranos is minimally invasive, and uses a pinprick in your finger to take just a couple drops of blood.
To date, Theranos has raised $92 million in VC funding from investors like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Larry Ellison.
Theranos has drawn skepticism from the scientific community in part because Theranos is cagey about how its tests actually work.
According to The New Yorker, Holmes "can quote Jane Austen by heart, [but] no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn't date, doesn't own a television, and hasn't taken a vacation in 10 years ... She is a vegan, and several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery."
![According to The New Yorker, Holmes "can quote Jane Austen by heart, [but] no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn](https://staticbiassets.in/thumb/msid-48086760,width-700,height-525,imgsize-88846/according-to-the-new-yorker-holmes-can-quote-jane-austen-by-heart-but-no-longer-devotes-time-to-novels-or-friends-doesnt-date-doesnt-own-a-television-and-hasnt-taken-a-vacation-in-10-years-she-is-a-vegan-and-several-times-a-day-she-drinks-a-pulverized-concoction-of-cucumber-parsley-kale-spinach-romaine-lettuce-and-celery-.jpg)
Holmes has more than 50% equity in Theranos, which has a $9 billion valuation. Theranos is now licensed to run in every US state.
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