Elizabeth Holmes wants Trump to let her out of prison early

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and disgraced CEO of Theranos who was convicted of defrauding investors in 2022, is asking President Donald Trump to commute her sentence and arrange for an early release from prison.

The request, filed last year, would cut short the 11-year sentence Holmes is currently serving at a Federal Prison Camp in Texas. She is currently scheduled for release in December 2031.

Holmes was, at one point, the toast of Silicon Valley, with Theranos reaching valuations as high as $9 billion. The company claimed its technology could test for health issues, including cancer, with just a few drops of blood. The product didn't work, though, and in 2018 Holmes — and Sunny Balwani, Theranos’ second highest-ranking executive and the former boyfriend of Holmes — were convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

The White House has not commented on the request, but Trump has made several high-profile pardons in the first year of his second term. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to a money laundering charge in 2023, received one last October. And on Trump's second day in office, Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht was released from his life-sentence after receiving a full and unconditional pardon.

Last year, Holmes saw an appeals court uphold her conviction, which also includes $452 million in restitution she and Balwani have been ordered to pay victims.

Regardless of Trump's decision on Holmes' request, she will serve less time in prison than she was sentenced. She has already shaved three years off of the total and could cut that by even more time.

Holmes seems to have settled into prison life in the meantime. Last year, she told People magazine she wakes up daily at around 5:00 a.m., eats a breakfast of fruit, then does 40 minutes of exercise. She begins her job, as a reentry clerk at the facility’s education building, at 8:00 a.m., earning 31 cents per hour. There, she helps women write resumes and apply for tax credits. She also works as a law clerk and teaches a French class, the magazine says.

Once a week she attends cognitive and behavioral therapy for PTSD overseen by a psychiatrist. And in her spare time she reads everything from I Ching to the Harry Potter novels. Twice a day she calls her family, often waiting an hour or more for a phone to open up.