Convicted Fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, Once Worth $4.5 Billion, Says She's Broke and Can't Pay Victims $250 a Month

Elizabeth Holmes, a one-time multi-billionaire, was convicted of fraud and conspiracy in January 2022 by a jury of her peers in San Jose, California. The Stanford dropout and the subject of the Hulu miniseries The Dropout, misrepresented her company Theranos, claiming that a single drop of blood could detect hundreds of diseases. She went on to defraud investors of millions and millions of dollars before her house of cards came tumbling down. She was later handed down one of the staunchest sentences for an American CEO by Edward Davila, who sent her to prison for 11 years and ordered to pay $452 million in restitution to investors including media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. However, according to Holmes, she is so broke that she can't afford to pay her victims $250 a month. 

Lawyers for the mother-of-two claim that Holmes, once worth a whopping $4.5 billion dollars, claim that she can't even afford to pay her victims the $250 a month restitution ordered by the court. 

Holmes is jointly responsible for paying the money back with her ex-boyfriend and Theranos' former chief operating officer, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, who has also been convicted. He is currently serving up to 13 years in prison. 

Federal prosecutors have demanded that once on supervised release from prison, criminal monetary penalties should be paid monthly in the amount of $250, or at least 10% of her wages, whichever is greater.

However, in their latest legal filing, her lawyers claim "there is no basis in the record for the payment structure in the government's request." They also maintain she has "limited financial resources."

"Mr. Balwani's amended judgment says nothing about what the Court intended for Ms. Holmes' restitution schedule. Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani have different financial resources and the Court has appropriately treated them differently," they wrote in a filing Monday. 

Last month, Holmes told the New York Times that she would "have to work for the rest of my life to try to pay" her legal bills, let alone restitution.