The fall of Elizabeth Holmes how Silicon Valley's trial of the century unfolded

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00:00Elizabeth Holmes was the world's youngest self-made female billionaire,

00:04described as the next Steve Jobs from her revolutionary medical testing company.

00:09And we'd like to see a world in which every person gets access to this type of basic testing.

00:19So she founded this company Theranos that said it could revolutionize blood testing

00:26and her whole thing was why do you need to take so much blood?

00:29Couldn't you get a blood test on just a pinprick of blood?

00:32So the way that Theranos worked is you would just take a little bit of blood from your finger

00:37and it would test that for lots of diseases.

00:39And the idea would be easier, quicker, cheaper.

00:42You could do it anyway.

00:43You wouldn't have to go and see a doctor.

00:45But it turned out that this taking a teeny pinprick of blood

00:49isn't actually enough blood to test for these things.

00:52Theranos employees told us they were instructed to stage fake demonstrations for investors

00:57who visited company headquarters.

00:59It was kind of a show.

01:01All they would see was their blood getting collected.

01:04They didn't see what was going on behind closed doors about how it was processed.

01:08This obviously created a huge scandal and it led to lots of people allegedly getting

01:13the incorrect test results.

01:14People were told that they were miscaraging when actually they were healthily pregnant.

01:20And other people were told that they had HIV when actually they didn't.

01:24A man who goes by the initials RC right now in Arizona,

01:29who is suggesting that the lab results that he got from Theranos were not accurate

01:35and it led to him having a heart attack.

01:37Based on what you know, is it possible that what he's saying is true?

01:41I'm not the lab director and so...

01:43Elizabeth Hans quickly became a big player in Silicon Valley.

01:51She had invented something new and that's sort of everything that Silicon Valley is about.

01:55And people were saying, could she be the next Steve Jobs?

01:59You know, would this medical testing thing do for the medical industry what Apple had done for

02:05technology? You know, she was being compared to sort of the iPhone moment.

02:10And she was also in that same way, you know, very charismatic and she would do these TED talks.

02:17She had managed to convince regulators, both medical and financial, that this worked.

02:25And more than that, she'd convinced some of the world's most famous and richest people

02:30to pump lots of money into our company, including Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger,

02:36you know, some of the really big names.

02:40Elizabeth Holmes is now a convicted felon.

02:43A jury found the former biotech CEO guilty of four conspiracy and fraud charges

02:49for swindling her investors.

02:51The allegations of fraud against Holmes date back several years.

02:56And it all sort of came out into the public, started coming out to the public in 2015,

03:02when Wall Street Journal investigative journalists first started looking into the sort of reliability

03:09of these tests. And then there were more and more stories. And that's when investors got spooked.

03:15And they figured out that actually maybe this company isn't really doing what it says it does.

03:21She is very likely to spend a considerable amount of time in prison. And we don't know how long yet.

03:30We'll have to wait for the sentencing hearing. It will probably be in about six months. And we have

03:35to wait until a second trial of her partner is concluded as well. But on the charges that she's been

03:44found guilty of, she could face 20 years for each one. The case is seen as not just a trial on Elizabeth

03:51Holmes, but a trial on the culture of Silicon Valley. It's exposed this fake it till you make it culture

03:57in Silicon Valley, where the founders of companies can sometimes exaggerate what their their inventions

04:05or what they founded can do in order to convince investors to come on board. And investors sometimes

04:10are so scared of missing out on like the next Facebook or the next Apple, that even if they've got

04:16doubts, they might invest anyway, because they got FOMO that they might miss the next Apple.

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