The rise and fall of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is taking centre stage in the upcoming Disney+ series “The Dropout,” starring Amanda Seyfried and Neveen Andrews. For those unfamiliar with the story, Holmes founded the blood test startup in 2003 before dropping out of Stanford University, and the company was valued at $9 billion over a decade later. By 2015, Forbes named Holmes as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. Theranos promised to rapidly conduct blood tests using small amounts of blood, but amid growing concerns over the validity of the test results, The Wall Street Journal exposed the shortcomings with Theranos’s technology.
The 2015 report marked the downfall of a blood-tech company that was once touted as the next big thing. But perhaps what is just as engrossing is Holmes’s secret 12-year relationship with Pakistani-born entrepreneur Sunny Balwani (née Ramesh Balwani), who joined the Theranos in 2009 as vice president before becoming the company’s chief operating officer. Deposition tapes reported by ABC News in 2019 confirmed Holmes and Balwani’s relationship, though Theranos employees and investors weren’t aware of anything romantic going on between the two.
Ahead of “The Dropout”‘s March 3 premiere, take a look at Balwani and Holmes’s relationship timeline.
