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Elizabeth Holmes’ secret links to China: the disgraced Theranos CEO, played by Amanda Seyfried in The Dropout, speaks fluent Mandarin and met ex-boyfriend Ramesh Balwani while studying in Beijing
STORYLynn Farah
- Amanda Seyfried is about to hit our screens portraying Holmes in Hulu’s adaptation of podcast The Dropout, while her one-time boyfriend is about to go on trial this March
- It seems the former Theranos CEO’s past life is catching up with her – but few realise Elizabeth Holmes’ ties to Asia, and the pivotal role they played in the Theranos story
Elizabeth Holmes is no stranger to global attention. She became a cult figure when her company Theranos garnered millions in investment, only for it to emerge that the science behind her ideas was not solid and that she had in fact defrauded investors.
But now the spotlight on Holmes will be even brighter after the release of Hulu’s series on the 38-year-old disgraced entrepreneur, The Dropout. It stars Amanda Seyfried and Naveen Andrews, with Seyfried already getting critical hype for her portrayal of Holmes.
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Holmes faced a lengthy court trial and was found guilty on four charges in January – three counts of fraud and one count of conspiring to defraud private investors. Her sleight? She promised investors her trailblazing tech could conduct multiple extensive health tests with just one drop of blood. But that turned out to be an elaborate and ultimately untrue claim, and together with her then boyfriend Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani – who was Theranos’ COO – she came under increased scrutiny as the business came crashing down around them. Here’s how Holmes got her entry into blood testing and why China played such a big role in her sensational story.
The China obsession: different versions
Richard Fuisz, a psychiatrist who knew Holmes since childhood, was interviewed by Forbes about his relationship. He claimed Holmes had low grades at school and that her parents had heard that if she learned a language and attended a summer programme, she could increase her chances of getting into Stanford. Fuisz said she quickly signed up to study Mandarin through a summer programme at Stanford as a result.
However, before the collapse of Theranos and while she still had the world’s attention, a very different version of Holmes’ personal story was presented to the world. The New Yorker published an article in 2014 implying Holmes was some sort of Mandarin-speaking prodigy who had been so good at the language that she’d been desperate to study it at Stanford’s summer programme while still in senior school. More context was given by referencing the fact that Holmes’ father Chris had spent two weeks of every month in China in the 1980s helping American companies invest in development projects.
Unlike Fuisz’s version of events, the article quoted Holmes’ father as saying that Stanford’s admissions clerk got so frustrated by Elizabeth’s constant pleas to be accepted onto the course that he gave her the test in Mandarin on the spot – and she aced it. She then went on to complete three years of college Mandarin while still in senior school.
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