Fallen US biotech star Elizabeth Holmes was on Monday convicted of defrauding investors in her blood-testing startup Theranos, in a high-profile case seen as an indictment of Silicon Valley culture.
Jurors found Holmes guilty of four counts of tricking investors into pouring money into what she claimed was a revolutionary testing system, after a complex and lengthy trial.
They acquitted her of a number of the charges she had faced and did not reach a verdict on others.
The 37-year-old now faces the possibility of years behind bars, in a case that put on trial the line between startup hustle and criminal dishonesty.
Holmes had vowed to revolutionize diagnostics with self-service machines that could run an array of tests on just drops of blood, a vision that drew high-profile backers and made her a billionaire by the age of 30.
But it all collapsed after a Wall Street Journal reporting revealed that the machines did not work as promised.
Holmes was subsequently indicted in 2018.
During the case, her defence attorney tried to frame her client as a hardworking young entrepreneur who was trying to change the world but the prosecution depicted her instead as an unsuccessful businesswoman who “chose fraud over business failure.”
The trial has lasted more than three months and has fascinated so much to the extent of inspiring the popular book Bad Blood, the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley and an upcoming Hulu drama series, The Dropout.
