Theranos’s public story runs from a Stanford-dropout founding myth through a retail rollout to a pair of federal verdicts. The hinge is October 2015.
The beats below follow the Journal, the CMS file, and the Northern District of California dockets.
Beats
- A founder story and a closed box
Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 and raised money on secrecy and a claimed breakthrough in small-volume testing. Famous directors and investors gave the pitch social proof.
- Walgreens and the consumer claim
From 2013, wellness-center sites made the technology a patient-facing product. That retail step is why regulators and journalists could test the claim against real results.
- The Journal investigation
Carreyrou’s 2015 reporting, using former employees and laboratory records, alleged that the Edison story and the tests on offer were not the same thing.
- Sanctions and shutdown
CMS sanctions in 2016, voided results, SEC fraud charges in 2018, and the company’s dissolution ended the operating story before the criminal trials began.
- Two juries in San Jose
Holmes’s mixed 2022 verdict and Balwani’s sweep of convictions are the legal ending. Investor fraud was proved; Holmes’s patient counts were not.
The story on the public record is a completed investor-fraud case and a separate, narrower finding on patient counts — not an unfinished science project.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.