The media mogul Rupert Murdoch will be the main beneficiary of the compensation that Elizabeth Holmes has to pay to those affected by the Theranos health scam. The US court has sentenced the businesswoman to pay 452 million dollars to the project’s investors, among whom is the billionaire.
Specifically, Murdoch will take 125 million dollars as compensation after having invested 100 million dollars in Theranos between 2014 and 2015, an amount that he ended up losing. The same thing happened to other investors like Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Secretary of Education Betsy Davos.
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has been sentenced to 11 years in prison as the main culprit behind the Theranos scam. The great promise of Silicon Valley made investors believe that she had created a machine capable of diagnosing all kinds of diseases with a single drop of blood blood test. However, an investigation by The Wall Street Journal found that her machines were not really capable of performing these tests on small blood samples, as she claimed.
The discredited creator of the company is jointly responsible for that amount along with her former lover and partner Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who began serving his 13-year prison sentence last month for the fraudulent business.
A few days ago, an appeals court rejected Holmes’s attempt not to enter prison, a last-minute appeal to avoid a sentence that was due to begin serving on April 27. The judge, who sentenced her in November, will set a new date for her delivery to a prison.
Holmes has to meet these payments with a net worth, which went from $4.5 billion at its peak to nothing after the Theranos implosion. In any case, Rupert Murdoch is the main beneficiary on the role of reparations, although it is not clear how the culprits will be able to face them.