---
title: '10 Biggest Lies Elizabeth Holmes Told About Theranos'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=iqwfNbQFTo8'
video_id: 'iqwfNbQFTo8'
date: 2026-10-19
duration_sec: 893
channel: 'WatchMojo.com'
---

# 10 Biggest Lies Elizabeth Holmes Told About Theranos

> Source: [10 Biggest Lies Elizabeth Holmes Told About Theranos](https://youtube.com/watch?v=iqwfNbQFTo8)

## Summary

This video from WatchMojo details the ten biggest lies and misconceptions perpetuated by Elizabeth Holmes and her company, Theranos. It covers the fabricated financial projections, false claims of FDA approval, hidden quality control failures, and the eventual downfall of the company, which was valued at $9 billion before being exposed as fraudulent.

### Key Points

- **Fabricated Financial Projections** [00:17] — Holmes projected over $100 million in revenue for 2014, but actual revenue was just over $100,000. The financial models were entirely fabricated to bypass due diligence.
- **Misrepresenting FDA Approval** [01:47] — Holmes claimed Theranos was voluntarily submitting tests for FDA approval, but they were not. The FDA later found the nanotainer was an uncleared Class II medical device.
- **Hiding Quality Control Failures** [03:00] — Theranos machines routinely failed quality checks. Staff were instructed to delete outlier data points to make the machines pass inspection, constituting scientific fraud.
- **Forging Pharmaceutical Endorsements** [04:35] — Holmes claimed Pfizer and other pharma companies validated Theranos technology. She copied and pasted corporate logos onto internal reports to deceive investors.
- **The Military Battlefield Deception** [06:05] — Holmes claimed Theranos devices were saving lives on medevac helicopters in war zones. The DoD never deployed a single device, and the claims were fabrications.
- **Fake Demonstrations** [07:13] — VIP demos showed a progress bar but the machine did nothing. Engineers manually beamed results to phones, a practice known internally as the 'null protocol'.
- **Secretly Using Competitors' Machines** [08:39] — Theranos used Siemens and Abia machines for tests, not their own Edison devices. They diluted blood samples, leading to invalid results.
- **The Walgreens Rollout Illusion** [09:58] — Theranos promised in-store wellness centers but never delivered. Safeway spent $350 million retrofitting stores that Theranos never occupied.
- **The Single Drop of Blood Myth** [11:31] — The premise of testing from a single drop was scientifically flawed. Finger-prick blood is contaminated with interstitial fluid, making accurate testing impossible.
- **Endangering Patients with Inaccurate Results** [13:13] — Theranos voided nearly 1 million test results. Patients were falsely told they had HIV or were miscarrying, causing severe trauma and delayed treatments.

### Conclusion

The Theranos saga is a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked ambition and deception in the tech industry. Holmes's lies not only defrauded investors but also endangered patient lives, leading to her eventual conviction.

## Transcript

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at 10 of the biggest lies and misconceptions that Elizabeth Holmes told the public about her fraudulent company, Thanos. I think this is the moment in time to capture the story before I'm gone.
Fabricated financial projections. It's the day Elizabeth Holmes has done almost everything to avoid. Is there anything that you want to say to these investors? And now, finally, Silicon Valley's former pin-up girl has no choice but to face her reckoning.
To reach a staggering $9 billion valuation and make Elizabeth Holmes a billionaire, at least on paper, she had to convince investors that Theranos was a booming commercial enterprise. So, in 2014, she gave a presentation to investors, projecting a revenue of over $100 million for that year alone,
plus lucrative contracts with the pharmaceutical industry and the government. turning Theranos into a staggering $9 billion juggernaut and making home the tech valley's first self-made female billionaire.
Put simply, Theranos is going to make big, big money, so you might as well invest in my company right now. Only the real revenue for 2014 was slightly over $100,000, and the company was burning through cash at an unsustainable rate.
The financial models went far beyond optimistic projections. They were entirely fabricated numbers designed to bypass the due diligence of late-stage investors. In describing lists of homes, he said,
How often in your life do you get to meet a Beethoven, someone who is a genius? And he described her as a genius. Misrepresenting FDA approval. And it's been approved by the FDA? We are looking to make strategic relationships to move that along.
But I kind of agree with Mark Zuckerberg when he said, move fast and break things. Holmes publicly praised the FDA and claimed Theranos was voluntarily submitting its tests
for approval to prove its transparency. Of course, they were not. In fact, she spent years aggressively dodging FDA oversight by arguing that Theranos was performing laboratory-developed tests, a category which historically fell outside strict FDA
device regulations. Serinos, if I understand correctly, only had one of these tests approved by the FDA, even though they were all promised. However, Serinos was mass-producing a proprietary device and shipping blood across state lines, firmly placing it under FDA jurisdiction.
When the FDA finally launched a surprise inspection in 2015, they found that the nanotainer was an uncleared and unapproved Class II medical device. So help me understand how this is impossible that she'd go out with a product with no proof and no real permission to be able to sell it.
Right, well the main answer is that she misled and outright lied to the two main health regulators in this country. One is the FDA and the other is the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Hiding quality control failures.
Erica, can we do this please for the syphilis validation? Is there something wrong? No. Let me just delete the outliers there. I marked them out for you.
Thanks. Clinical laboratories like that of Theranos are bound by strict federal regulations requiring daily quality control checks. For example, labs must run a control sample with known values to ensure the machines are calibrated before patient blood is tested.
Theranos machines routinely failed these checks, producing results that were wildly off the mark. Instead of stopping patient testing to recalibrate or fix the machines, Stereo leadership driven by President Sonny Bolwani ordered lab technicians to cherry the data Were you ever asked to falsify data or destroy data Oh just get rid of these tests that you
run. If a machine produced six data points and two were wildly inaccurate, the staff was instructed to delete the outlier so the machine's average would pass inspection. Whistleblowers like Tyler Schultz and Erica Chung pointed out that this constituted massive scientific fraud and were
both threatened and intimidated for their efforts. I felt like I had a pretty good relationship with my grandfather. So I went to him with my concerns,
and he couldn't really understand the points that I was making, and he said, just move on with your life. Forging pharmaceutical endorsements. Peterson said Holmes falsely told her that major pharmaceutical companies
companies had validated Theranos' blood testing technology. To secure her initial war chest of venture capital, Holmes needed proof that the medical establishment backed her technology. So she claimed that major pharmaceutical giants were using Theranos to run clinical trials.
They were not. While companies like Pfizer and Novartis had met with Theranos, they had quickly assessed the technology, found it highly unreliable, and walked away. What's come out is that they did work with Pfizer in the very early years of the company.
Pfizer then had a scientist, Shane Weber, analyze everything that they'd seen and internally write a report that concluded they didn't want to pursue the relationship. Undeterred, Holmes took internal reports written by her own Theranos engineers and blatantly copied and pasted the corporate logos of Pfizer and Shearing Plow onto the top of the documents.
She then distributed these to investors, who wrongfully assumed that they were rigorous validation reports authored by genuine pharmaceutical scientists. Weber said he himself told Holmes that Pfizer wasn't interested in working with Theranos.
But about a year later, Theranos put out a report with the Pfizer logo on it, which Holmes used to pitch to investors. Some investors testified that they took the report at face value, and that it played into their decision to invest many millions of dollars.
The military battlefield deception. I just could not believe that anybody could get up in front of these young men and women who are actually willing to put their lives on the line for their country and lie to them.
Holmes claimed that Serenov's devices were rugged, portable, and currently saving lives on medevac helicopters in active war zones. In fact, she specifically targeted military brass and added figures like General James Mattis to her board of directors.
In truth, the U.S. Department of Defense never formally deployed a single Theranos device. Was a Theranos manufacturer device ever deployed in the battlefield?
No. Was it ever deployed in a medevac helicopter? No. When military regulatory officials reviewed the technology, they flagged severe safety and regulatory compliance issues, like breaking down in air-controlled offices.
The idea that they were actively functioning in the extreme heat and vibration of an Afghan battlefield was a complete fabrication used exclusively to awe investors. He said, quote, there came a point when I didn't know what to believe about Theranos anymore.
And there are some things you don't want to roll out as a prototype. And dealing with people's lives, health care, that would be one of them. Fake demonstrations. Especially for you, Wade.
Your autographed flag. This is great, thanks. but we need to see the lab. Raiden, it's not possible unless we have a deal in place. Silicon Valley culture relies heavily on the demo and Holmes mastered the art of it When VIPs politicians or journalists visited the Theranos headquarters they were treated to a personalized test
A phlebotomist would prick their finger, place the nanotainer into an Edison machine, and the screen would show a progress bar indicating the blood was being analyzed. What this witness did is to demonstrate to the jury that at the same time that Theranos was saying
they had this breakthrough medical technology, It was really just a cheap parlor trick, that it was a demonstration that was being faked. Of course, the machine was doing absolutely nothing but displaying a pre-programmed graphic.
As soon as the VIP was ushered into a conference room for a meeting, an engineer would extract the blood cartridge, dilute the sample, and manually beam the results back to the VIP's phone to maintain the illusion of instant analysis.
This was known internally as the null protocol. He says he didn't learn until two years later, in 2016, that technology demonstrations he was staging for potential business partners,
demonstrations directed in part by Holmes herself, were a charade. Secretly using competitors' machines. Why are they diluting the black circle? Erica? Oh, that's right.
And speaking of those machines, yeah, even those were a lie. The proprietary Edison machines were woefully inaccurate and incapable of running standard chemistry panels, so they brought in Siemens.
When patients thought that their blood was being tested by revolutionary technology developed by Theranos, it was actually being run on commercially available and entirely traditional machines made by Siemens and Abia.
This report is talking about a basic laboratory test, right? This doesn't have anything to do with Theranos' technology. Right. This test was actually performed by the Theranos lab in Northern California on a Siemens machine,
a commercial analyzer that the FDA approved and that any laboratory can buy. Because those machines required large vials of venous blood to operate, Theranos engineers had to hack them to accept the tiny nanotainer samples and dilute the blood.
However, doing this only led to wild, unpredictable, and medically useless test results. They were doing the test on standard equipment, and they were diluting the blood, which invalidates a lot of the results.
So I knew there was fraud going on from very early on. The Walgreens rollout illusion. In short, clinics make me think of sick people waiting for a flu shot.
They're thinking too small. What we want to offer are wellness centers. The ultimate goal of Theranos was to bypass doctors and put a testing center on every corner.
So Holmes struck massive deals with Walgreens and Safeway to build in-store wellness clinics. She promised these retailers that her Edison machines would sit in their pharmacies and provide customers with instant results. They never even made it to the stores.
Theranos needed access to patients, and Walgreens made that happen by opening wellness centers inside its stores. Partnerships with Theranos were disasters for Safeway and Walgreens.
Federal regulators found that Theranos technology did not work, and patients' lives were being put at risk. Because they didn't work, Theranos secretly resorted to drawing the tiny samples in the Arizona Walgreens stores
and then shipping them via FedEx or private couriers to California for testing. This only destroyed the samples. Safeway, meanwhile, spent $350 million retrofitting hundreds of supermarkets with clinics
that Theranos never occupied. Ultimately, Byrd testified the deal, including an initial investment of million in Theranos by Safeway and million invested in Shores went south when Safeway could not get test results from the Theranos machines
Bird says he was frustrated by the lack of success and that Theranos had not validated a single test. The single drop of blood myth. Let me ask you, when you heard about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos,
that she could transform the whole blood world by just a finger prick, tiny bit of blood, were you immediately skeptical? Yes. Theranos built its entire identity on the single drop of blood test.
And wouldn't you know it, the foundational premise of Theranos was scientifically flawed from the start. Venus blood draws from the arm are the medical gold standard because they provide a large and well-mixed sample of the body's chemistry.
But when you puncture a finger, you damage tissue, meaning the resulting blood droplet is contaminated with interstitial fluid and debris from ruptured cells. Sometimes we need to test the liquid portion of the blood.
Sometimes we need to test the cellular portion of that blood. And a drop, unfortunately, with our current assays and to meet all of those specifications, we know that it just wouldn't be able to get to that level of complexity.
Although I certainly understand why it would be appealing for people to have that idea in mind. So even if the Edison machine had functioned perfectly, the laws of fluid dynamics and biology meant that a tiny drop could never provide enough pristine plasma
to run the dozens of concurrent tests. The whole thing was a sham from day one. Holmes just hoped that no one would call her on it. The issue comes that she tried to essentially take an entire pathology lab and squish it into a little black box
and promised to be able to do all those tests all the time for people. And it takes years and years to develop a single one of those tests. up to the standard where it can be accurate. So it was, you know, ambitious doesn't quite capture it,
but it was incredibly ambitious. Endangering patients with inaccurate results. What is your view of that? That they're happy to go live with a system that's still being tested and is actually failing?
Yeah, it's unconscionable. It's unethical. It's immoral. You know, all the words you can think about to describe that. Because of the rampant dilution, ruined samples and failing machines, Theranos eventually had to void nearly 1 million test results, but the results were already given out before they were voided.
Patients were told they had HIV, pregnant people were told they were actively miscarrying, and others were supposedly on the verge of a fatal heart attack. Erin Tompkins testified Wednesday that she got a blood test from Theranos in 2015 at a Walgreens in Arizona.
It came back showing she had HIV antibodies. This naturally caused severe psychological trauma, and many victims rushed to their local emergency rooms only to be told that their blood was completely fine.
Conversely, patients with actual medical issues were given false negatives, like missing key indicators for prostate cancer. While the tests endangered lives and delayed treatments, prosecutors did not charge Holmes with manslaughter or wrongful death,
and no patient deaths have been conclusively linked to the company's false results in court. Today, nurse practitioner Audra Zachman was the first witness to testify that she saw an inaccurate Theranos test.
Zachman and her patient, Brittany Gold, both told jurors that when Gold was pregnant, she took a Theranos test that told her she had miscarried. A later diagnostic test from another lab showed Gold was still pregnant,
and she eventually delivered a healthy baby. What do you think of Elizabeth Holmes and the case of Theranos? Let us know in the comments. you