The one who dreamed of changing the world is now behind bars. Elizabeth Holmes, the former Silicon Valley star sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for fraud at the head of his start-up Theranos, began his sentence Tuesday in a prison in Texas near Houston, where his family is from.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) confirmed to AFP that the former entrepreneur arrived at the federal prison in Bryan, Texas, as observed by journalists.

In January 2022, after a four-month trial, Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of deception in raising funds for Theranos, which claimed to be able to revolutionize the world of medical diagnostics.

She tried several legal appeals not to go to jail pending a possible appeal, hoping to have her conviction overturned, but they were rejected.

"Minimum" security

At 39, twenty years after founding the start-up, she is behind bars in a women's institution, equipped with a "minimum" security device. According to the BOP website, this type of prison has dormitories, a low number of guards and rehabilitation programmes.

Theranos promised faster and cheaper diagnostics than traditional laboratories, thanks to methods presented as revolutionary, allowing multiple tests with a very small amount of blood. But the technology never worked as promised, and the company closed in 2018, leaving investors who had injected hundreds of millions of dollars into the company's capital.

$452 million to be returned

Elizabeth Holmes has always claimed her good faith, denying that she knowingly sought to deceive investors. In mid-May, Judge Edward Davila ordered him and former Theranos COO Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani to jointly and severally return $452 million to investors. Among them, Rupert Murdoch, to whom the two former partners owe $ 125 million.

In an interview with the New York Times, published in early May, Elizabeth Holmes explained that even before the damages, she was unable to pay her legal fees, which the prosecution estimated at more than $ 30 million.

"I'm going to have to work for the rest of my life to pay them back," she said.

The press reported that she married Billy Evans, whose family owns a hotel chain, in 2019. She has two young children. Her story fascinated the American media, because before her downfall, she embodied a certain image of innovative Silicon Valley. In 2014, Forbes valued Holmes' fortune at $4.5 billion and described her as the youngest female billionaire who did not inherit her fortune.

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