Thirty-four days before she's sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss.
Elizabeth Holmes grew up in Houston, Texas, and enrolled at Stanford University in 2002 to study chemical engineering. After her first year, she worked at the Genome Institute of Singapore on research involving blood samples from SARS patients. In 2003, at age 19, she left Stanford during her sophomore year to start Real-Time Cures, later renamed Theranos.
Theranos claimed it could run many medical tests using small finger-prick blood samples. Holmes served as its founder, chief executive and public face. The company raised more than $700 million and reached a private valuation near $9 billion. A 2015 Wall Street Journal investigation raised serious questions about its technology and testing practices. Regulatory actions and lawsuits followed. Walgreens ended its partnership, and Theranos dissolved in 2018.
In March 2018, Holmes settled civil fraud charges brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. She agreed to pay $500,000, return shares and accept a ten-year ban from leading a public company. Federal prosecutors indicted Holmes and former Theranos president Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani that June.
On 3 January 2022, a jury convicted Holmes of one conspiracy count and three wire-fraud counts involving investors. She was acquitted on four counts. Jurors reached no verdict on three others. In November 2022, she received a 135-month federal prison sentence and three years of supervised release. Holmes and Balwani were ordered to pay about $452 million in restitution.
Holmes began serving her sentence at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas on 30 May 2023. The Ninth Circuit upheld her conviction, sentence and restitution order in 2025. A federal judge reduced her prison term to 123 months in March 2026.