The Theranos Deception - 60 Minutes Report

[Melanie]

I watched this last night. "Pathological liar."

The Theranos Deception
How a company with a blood-testing machine that could never perform as touted went from billion-dollar baby to complete bust

Elizabeth Holmes was just 19 years old when she dropped out of Stanford University with a dream of creating a company that would revolutionize blood testing. She founded the start-up Theranos and boasted her technology could take a pin-prick worth of blood from the finger and perform hundreds of laboratory tests. It was, she claimed, "the most important thing humanity has ever built."

Day to day operations were run by company president Sunny Balwani. Balwani is a millionaire software engineer with no training in the biological sciences. But he did have a powerful connection to Elizabeth Holmes. Sunny Balwani was her secret boyfriend.

Well because she raised money, hundreds of millions of dollars, on the basis of this technology not only being ready and working but being commercially rolled out. You're also lying to the public. You're lying to patients. You're lying to doctors. You're lying to regulators. Most people would call that fraud, as well.

The Securities and Exchange Commission called it "massive fraud" when they charged Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani in March. Holmes settled the SEC case without admitting guilt and paid a half a million dollar fine. Balwani, who left Theranos two years ago, calls the SEC charges unwarranted and is fighting them.