Elizabeth Holmes made history for all the wrong reasons, despite the encouragement of her parents, Christian and Noel Anne Holmes, to be exceptional.
As a child, the founder of Theranos wanted to transform the world, but she is already in prison for a scheme that defrauded investors of millions of dollars. Her career aspirations were influenced by her father’s work in environmental conservation and humanitarian aid.
Christian noted in a 2014 interview with Fortune that despite the fact that they had to relocate multiple times due to his career, Elizabeth remained strong and focused on innovation. Christian and Noel responded by nurturing that spark and encouraging Elizabeth’s various goals.
Christian gave his daughter a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, a work by the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor, before she departed for Stanford University. Prior to Elizabeth’s legal troubles, he told the publication, “I wanted it to reinforce the message of a purposeful life.” “I believe it had a significant impact on her.”
Elizabeth was sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison in 2022 after being charged with three charges of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Since then, it has been lowered to nine years for good behavior, with a 2032 release date. She knows what she wants to accomplish with her free time.
Regarding an American Freedom Act that she hand-drafted with the intention of strengthening the presumption of innocence and enhancing the criminal justice system, she told PEOPLE, “This will be my life’s work.”
Here is all the information you need to know about Christian and Noel Anne Holmes, Elizabeth Holmes’ parents.
Christian is a descendant of the Fleischmann Yeast fortune
Christian, Elizabeth’s father, was from a well-known family. Christian Holmes, his great-grandfather, left Denmark as a young man to immigrate to the United States. According to The New Yorker, he made his home in Cincinnati, where he pursued studies in engineering before becoming a doctor.
Dr. Holmes met Charles Fleischmann, a patient at a nearby hospital, who had established a baking business by selling packaged yeast. Dr. Holmes later married Bettie Fleischmann, Charles’ daughter, and the two became wealthy and successful.
According to the 2018 nonfiction book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Elizabeth’s father’s family had unfortunately spent most of the family fortune by the time he was born. Christian continued to share tales of his family’s history as entrepreneurs despite this.
When Elizabeth told The New Yorker in 2014, she said, “I grew up with those stories about greatness and about people choosing not to spend their lives on something purposeful and what happens to them when they make that choice — the impact on character and quality of life.”
Christian was once an executive at Enron
Christian attended The Webb Schools and was raised in California. According to Bad Blood, he later enrolled at Wesleyan University to study government and political science.
According to his LinkedIn profile, he began his career as a second lieutenant of civil affairs in the Army Reserves before becoming active in government employment. Christian has held various positions at the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in addition to various positions at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The family moved as a result of several more professional changes, and Christian eventually found employment with Enron, an electric and gas corporation that was then valued at over $100 billion. However, the company was discovered for accounting fraud while he was a vice president at a section of the company, ultimately resulting in their bankruptcy.
Despite the Holmes family’s brief financial difficulties, Christian went on to work at the World Wildlife Fund and Rice University before spending a few years back at USAID, according to Bad Blood. Now employed with The Boston Consulting Group, Christian specializes in the “performance of water and wastewater utilities.”
Noel worked for the government before welcoming Elizabeth
Noel was a government employee before she became a mother to Elizabeth and her brother Christian.
The New Yorker claims that she met her spouse while working as a defense and foreign policy staffer on Capitol Hill.
Noel left her job to raise their family full-time when they were married and had their first kid.
Elizabeth grew up seeing her father’s humanitarian work
Elizabeth grew up watching her father work in environmental conservation and humanitarian aid. Despite their many moves, Elizabeth found inspiration in Christian’s endeavors to improve the world.
I grew up in a home filled with photos of young children in difficult regions of the world because my father worked in disaster relief. In 2014, she told CNN, “I was absolutely convinced that was what I was going to do.”
“Then I started thinking about the concept of what could I build that could impact a lot of people’s lives,” she added, “after I started realizing that a company could be a vehicle for having very direct impact over a change that you are trying to make.”
According to The New Yorker, Elizabeth was also inspired by Christian’s profession to learn Mandarin, which facilitated her early admission to Stanford University.
With her parents’ support, Elizabeth began learning Mandarin in the 1980s when Christian’s work required him to travel to China for two weeks each month. She persuaded Stanford to let her enroll in college-level language courses the summer following her sophomore year of high school.
She attended full-time at Stanford, where she eventually created Theranos, after completing three years of Mandarin studies there by the time she graduated from high school.
Christian and Noel supported Elizabeth dropping out of Stanford
Elizabeth decided to leave Stanford after just one year in order to concentrate on starting her business.
Fortune claims that after interning at the Genome Institute of Singapore for the summer following her freshman year, she returned home ready to revolutionize the field.
Inspired by the concepts she had developed in Singapore, she spent many days drafting a patent application before to her sophomore year.
She hardly moved for five or six days after I watched her sit down at the computer. Noel told the newspaper, “She slept maybe one or two hours a night for five nights, and I would bring her food occasionally.”
Christian and Noel encouraged Elizabeth to drop out of school, even though he anticipated his daughter would earn a PhD.
“What are your goals for your kids? You want them to pursue a passion of their own. to pursue their aspirations. to assist others. to alter the course of events. “Of course,” we replied. “Go do this,” explained Noel.
Christian and Noel were early supporters of Theranos
According to Fortune, Christian and Noel permitted their daughter to use the funds they had saved for her college tuition to fund her blood-testing firm, despite their lack of understanding of the specific goals she had in mind.
Elizabeth later used that money to finance Theranos’s early years and use her family’s connections to locate other investors for the business.
Christian and Noel were by their daughter’s side during her fraud trial
Elizabeth’s healthcare venture Theranos had grown into a billion-dollar business more than ten years after she left Stanford. Elizabeth garnered millions of dollars from investors with the promise of technology that could do hundreds of medical tests with just a few drops of blood.
However, things were not as they appeared behind the scenes. Whistleblowers exposed the company’s “elaborate years-long” deception in 2015, which defrauded investors of millions of dollars by deceiving doctors and patients about the effectiveness of the company’s blood tests.
Nine charges of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud were brought against Elizabeth and Sunny Balwani, the former president of her company, in the spring of 2018. In 2020, Holmes was charged with a tenth instance of wire fraud.
In 2021, Elizabeth’s parents supported her during the trial. Elizabeth and her mother entered the courtroom hand in hand on multiple occasions.
When Elizabeth was formally sentenced to more than 11 years in prison in 2022 after being found guilty on four of the counts, Christian and Noel were also in the vicinity. Since then, it has been lowered to nine years for good behavior.
They have visited Elizabeth in prison
Despite keeping a low profile since their daughter was sent to jail, Christian and Noel were seen together in June 2023 during a visitors’ day at Federal jail Camp Bryan in Texas.
At the facility, pictures showed Elizabeth’s parents and her husband, Billy Evans, conversing at a picnic table and strolling through the prison yard.
Since then, her parents have come to see her on various occasions, such as when Elizabeth turned 40 in 2024.
