Notorious Silicon Valley scam artist asks Trump for pardon

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the defunct blood-testing company Theranos, has filed a clemency petition with the Department of Justice's Office of the Pardon Attorney seeking early release from prison, according to SFist. The petition status is listed as pending, according to KRON4.

Holmes was sentenced in late 2022 to 11 years in federal prison after being convicted of defrauding investors in Theranos. Her sentence was reduced to nine years for good behavior, but federal rules prevent further reductions. She is currently serving her sentence at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Bryan, Texas — where Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell is also being held — and is scheduled for release in December 2031.

The timing of Holmes's clemency request comes as she has become more active on social media in recent months. According to reports, she has been tweeting through a surrogate about evidentiary issues in her trial that she believes should exonerate her.

Holmes has pursued multiple legal avenues to reduce her sentence. Last June, she sought a two-year sentence reduction after most of her appeal options were exhausted. She also granted an exclusive interview to People Magazine about her life in prison, where she described her experience as difficult while highlighting her work teaching French to other inmates and serving as a reentry clerk.

The 41-year-old has pursued various strategies to secure early release. Her first child was born in 2021 during her trial, and a second child was born shortly before her sentence began, timing that some observers have noted.

The White House has not commented on Holmes or her clemency request.

Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos back in 2003 when she was just 19 years old. She promised to have invented revolutionary blood-testing technology that could run comprehensive tests from just a few drops of blood. The company quickly attracted massive investment and venture capital backing, eventually reaching a $9 billion valuation.

Holmes became one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires and the media ate it up. She carefully crafted a Steve Jobs-like image, complete with a signature black turtleneck and built a whole brand around the idea of revolutionizing healthcare diagnostics.

Then came the reality check. Investigations revealed that Theranos's core technology simply didn't work the way Holmes claimed. The blood-testing devices gave inaccurate results, and the company was actually relying on third-party machines to run most tests. Yet Holmes and company president Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani kept making false promises to investors, business partners, and the public anyway.

The house of cards came crashing down after The Wall Street Journal published investigative reports in 2015. Federal regulators shut down Theranos's Newark lab and invalidated two years of test results. By 2018, the company was gone.

Both Holmes and Balwani faced fraud charges. Holmes was convicted in January 2022 on four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy, while Balwani was hit with all 12 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy charges that July.

The whole saga grabbed headlines largely because of the high-profile investors who lost money — billionaires like Betsy DeVos, Rupert Murdoch, and the Walton family. It also sparked bigger conversations about startup culture, the importance of actually doing due diligence in venture capital and what happens when ambitious entrepreneurs operate without real oversight.