All About Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes' Complicated Relationship With Sunny Balwani
After Elizabeth Holmes' skyrocketed to the top of Silicon Valley back in the 2010s, the now 38-year-old founder of Theranos, a now defunct blood-testing company, and her business partner and eventual boyfriend, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, 57, are both facing jail time for their company-related crimes. In 2022, Sunny was found guilty of 12 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud with Theranos investors, doctors, and patients, while Elizabeth was also found guilty that same year on many of the same charges, according to NBC Bay Area, NBC, and The Guardian.
Elizabeth was finally sentenced in November of 2022, and is now set to spend 11 years and three months in prison following the birth of her second child. Sunny's fate has yet to be announced, as he faces his final sentencing hearing on Dec. 8.
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But, how exactly did Elizabeth and Sunny get to this point? And perhaps more interestingly, how did they first connect, and why did they break up? Here's everything you need to know about their rocky relationship:
Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani met in 2002.
Elizabeth and Sunny met 20 years ago, back in 2002. They first crossed paths in Beijing, China, while on a language-immersion trip with Stanford University, according to Sunny's divorce filings, per PopSugar. At the time, Elizabeth was an 18-year-old senior in high school and Sunny was a 37-year-old student pursuing his MBA at the University of California, Berkeley, according to Refinery29.
Elizabeth Holmes in 2019.
Sunny Balwani in 2019.
They started dating in 2004.
Some reports claim that the two didn't start dating until Elizabeth dropped out of college two years later. By then, Elizabeth was trying to collect enough seed money to get Theranos off of the ground.
By 2005, the pair were living together.
Knopf Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Vall
Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani went to elaborate lengths to keep their 12-year romance a secret while running Theranos—lying to investors, most employees, and press to shield the fact that Holmes, the company’s founder and CEO, was dating and living with Balwani, the company’s second-in-command. This, of course, was not the largest lie that Holmes and Balwani, who is nearly 19 years her senior, told in their troublesome quest to build a billion-dollar business—but it certainly would have been of interest to investors, who likely would have flagged it as being a conflict of interest. The first three episodes of The Dropout, now out on Hulu, trace this real-life relationship and the way it affected Holmes and the ill-fated start-up.
Their partnership became even more interesting in 2021, about five years after it ended. During her trial for fraud, after years of strategic silence, Holmes volunteered her version of the story in order to help build a case against her longtime boyfriend—who she claimed had emotionally and sexually abused her, and manipulated her into mismanaging the company. (Balwani has vehemently denied these allegations through his lawyer.) In an attempt to counter this argument, the government released hundreds of text messages between the Theranos executives, revealing just how much their relationship blurred personal and professional lines.
Speaking toVanity Fair’s Joy Press,Dropout star Amanda Seyfried said that the text messages—which were released once she was filming Hulu’s series, in which she stars as Holmes—were “incredibly informative,” not to mention “juicy AF.”
“[The texts] really illustrated the dynamic between Sunny and Elizabeth so beautifully,” said Seyfried. “They were—there’s no nonjudgmental way to describe it—they were just so weird. And we were able to put these [conversations] in the script. The only weird thing about it was that I was speaking things that were texted, like: ‘We will transcend!
Sunny Balwani
Former president and COO of Theranos
Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani (born June 13, 1965) is a Pakistani-born businessman, former president and chief operating officer of Theranos, which was a privately heldhealth technology company founded by his then-girlfriend Elizabeth Holmes. He and Holmes fraudulently represented that they had devised a revolutionary blood test that required only small amounts of blood, such as from a fingerstick. Both Balwani and Holmes were convicted of fraud. The consequences of the fraud led to the collapse of Theranos and the loss of billions of dollars to investors.
Starting in 2015, Theranos came under criticism in the media due to its questionable claims and practices. The company was eventually liquidated. Balwani and Holmes were criminally charged by federal authorities for operating the business as a multi-million dollar scheme to defraud investors and patients. Holmes was found guilty and sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in prison. Balwani was found guilty on all counts, and was sentenced to 12 years and 11 months, plus three years of probation and surrendered on April 20, 2023. Holmes and Balwani were further ordered to pay $452 million to the victims of the fraud, with responsibility for the payment shared between them. Balwani was portrayed by Naveen Andrews in the 2022 miniseriesThe Dropout, which documented his relationship with Holmes and his role within Theranos.
Early life and education
Ramesh Balwani was born in West Pakistan (Sindh, Pakistan), into an upper middle-class Sindhi Hindu farming family. He attended Aitchison College, a prestigious boarding school in Lahore, until 1984. Balwani speaks Sindhi, Urdu, Hindi and English.
His family eventually moved to India "because being a Hindu in a mostly all-Muslim cou
2002: Elizabeth Holmes, then an
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is set to report to prison. Here's a timeline of her relationship with her co-defendant and ex-boyfriend, Sunny Balwani.
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In 2002, Elizabeth Holmes, then 18, met Sunny Balwani, then 37, in Beijing, China.
Balwani became her long-term boyfriend and, later, the COO of her startup, Theranos.
Both were sentenced to more than a decade behind bars. Holmes is set to report to prison Tuesday.
Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani engaged in a years-long workplace relationship that ended when he left their company, Theranos, in 2016.
As the former CEO and COO of Theranos, respectively, Holmes and Balwani are now notorious for their failed medical startup that collected hundreds of millions of dollars from investors under false pretenses.
In January 2022, following a four-month trial, Holmes was found guilty on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy, and she was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison, with three years of supervised release. She was scheduled to report for her sentence in April, but it was delayed by appeals to her conviction.
However, Holmes is expected to report to prison on Tuesday to finally begin her sentence.
After Balwani was found guilty on 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy in July 2022, he was sentenced to almost 13 years in prison, with three years of probation. His sentence was also delayed by an appeal, but in April, he reported to a low-security federal prison in California to begin the sentence, Insider's Sarah Jackson and Áine Cain reported.
Here's a timeline of their relationship.
2002: Elizabeth Holmes, then an 18-year-old college student, met millionaire Sunny Balwani, then 37, while they both studied in Beijing, China.