Holmes was convicted of harming patients.
The January 2022 verdict convicted her on investor-related counts and acquitted her on patient-related wire-fraud counts. Balwani was convicted on patient-related counts.
The trial court finished in 2022. Appeals, surrender dates, and restitution calculations are the administrative aftermath.
The most common error in English-language recaps is treating Holmes’s verdict as a clean sweep on patients.
Still open
- Appellate dispositions — Ninth Circuit issues can modify sentences or counts. The trial-court record remains the 2022 verdicts until an opinion says otherwise.
- Restitution arithmetic — Who is owed what among investors is a judgment-and-collection problem, not a new mystery about whether a fraud occurred.
- Patient-harm historiography — CMS files and Balwani’s convictions document laboratory harm; Holmes’s acquittals on those counts complicate popular summaries.
- Other point-of-care firms — The market for small-sample testing continues under other companies’ clearances. Guilt does not transfer by analogy.
- Civil remnants — Investor and partner civil cases settled on varying terms; some files are thinner than the criminal record.
Myth vs record
The Journal invented the problems.
CMS inspections and two juries independently found serious false statements and laboratory failures after the 2015 articles.
No blood tests were ever run.
Tests were offered and run, including on third-party machines. The fraud theory was about what the company’s own technology and validations could do, not about a total absence of any assay.
A $9 billion public company vanished.
Theranos was private. The $9 billion figure was a 2014 fundraising valuation reported in the press, not an exchange capitalization.
Local notes
Journal ownership of the scoop
English-language finance and tech desks still treat Carreyrou’s series as the model for a stealth-biotech takedown — a prestige that shapes how later device startups are covered.
Silicon Valley morality play
U.S. and U.K. features leaned on costume and voice. Serious legal coverage had to keep pulling readers back to the verdict form.
Investor-name fascination
Coverage of famous limited partners sometimes outran the CMS file. The encyclopedia keeps the laboratory and the jury ahead of the guest list.
The aftermath is a split verdict that popular culture keeps trying to make simple, and a laboratory file that was already grim before the jury sat.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.