The disgraced founder of the blood testing start-up Theranos, who was convicted of fraud, is expected to report to a minimum-security prison in Texas.Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced entrepreneur who was convicted of defrauding investors at her failed blood testing start-up Theranos, is expected to report to a federal prison in Texas on Tuesday to begin her 11-year, three-month sentence.Ms. Holmes is expected to report to FPC Bryan, a minimum-security prison camp for women located roughly 90 minutes from Houston. Its 655 inmates are required to work in the cafeteria or in a manufacturing facility, where pay starts at $1.15 an hour, according to the prison’s handbook. Before starting work at the factory, Ms. Holmes may take a test to assess her strengths in areas such as business, clerical, numerical, logic, mechanical and “social.” Inmates can also enroll in a “Lean Six Sigma” training program to learn about efficiency.“We try to help our ladies obtain work in the factory which focuses on their strengths so they may develop additional marketable skills,” the prison’s handbook says.Ms. Holmes, 39, was found guilty last year of four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy for falsely claiming that Theranos’s blood tests could detect a variety of ailments with just a few drops of blood. She and her former business partner, Ramesh Balwani, must together pay $452 million in restitution to investors who were defrauded. Ms. Holmes has appealed her case, though her requests to remain out of prison during the appeal have been denied.Ms. Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford University at age 19. The company raised $950 million in funding, making her a billionaire on paper. Theranos collapsed in 2018. Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani were indicted that year.The pair were tried separately. Mr. Balwani was convicted on 12 counts of fraud and is serving a nearly 13-year sentence in a federal prison in San Pedro, Calif. He has also appealed his case.Ms. Holmes’s sentence was meant to send a message to others in Silicon Valley: There are consequences when ambitious start-up founders take an ethos known as “fake it till you make it” — when entrepreneurs speak ambitiously about what their companies can do, even if the companies can’t yet do those things — too far. Despite the tech industry’s long history of stretching the rules, as entrepreneurs invent new businesses and disrupt old ones, few have ever gone to prison for lying.Since her conviction, Ms. Holmes has been living in a rental home in San Diego near the family of Billy Evans, who is the father of her two children. During her trial, held in San Jose, Calif., Ms. Holmes and Mr. Evans lived in a home on the grounds of Green Gables, a $135 million estate in the wealthy town of Woodside.Their two young children, William and Invicta, will be able to conduct video calls with Ms. Holmes and visit her on weekends and federal holidays. Phone calls are limited to 15 minutes each, with a total of 300 minutes per month.At FPC Bryan, Ms. Holmes, known for wearing black turtlenecks to mimic Steve Jobs while running Theranos, and, during her trial, sporting heels, sheath dresses and a diaper bag, will wear prison-issued khaki pants and shirts in pastel green, gray, or white with athletic shoes that must not exceed $100 in value.She will not have any internet access but can buy a radio ($31.75) or MP3 player ($88.40) from the commissary. All music must be “non-explicit,” according to the prison’s handbook.FPC Bryan offers leisure activities including music programs, “table games” and movies, according to its handbook. Arts and crafts are available, including beading, knitting, paper art, crochet and ceramics. A crochet needle costs $1.30 and yarn is $3.55 at FPC Bryan’s commissary, according to the handbook.Inmates are allowed to access an outdoor “recreation yard pavilion” but must return to their dorms for head counts that occur five times every 24 hours.Counterfeiting or forging documents and conducting a business are against the rules. Ms. Holmes admitted to falsifying pharmaceutical reports to solicit investors while testifying in her trial.Other inmates at the prison camp include Jen Shah, a “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star who is serving a five-and-a-half year sentence for wire fraud related to telemarketing. In a blog post from March about her first few days in prison, Ms. Shah described difficulty operating the phone system, which uses account numbers, and noted that not many people were nice. Breakfast was instant oatmeal, an apple and a slice of wheat bread with jelly, she wrote.Lea Fastow, a former executive for the collapsed energy company Enron, was incarcerated for tax fraud at FPC Bryan for 11 months in the mid-2000s. Jenna Ryan, a participant in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, spent 60 days there. And Michelle Janavs, daughter of the Hot Pocket co-founder, served five months for her association with the “Operation Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal.Three inmates escaped FPC Bryan in 2017. One of them, Edith Lara, who was serving time for drug charges, has not been found, according to the Bureau of Prisons website.

Pi, an A.I. tool that debuted this week, is a twist on the new wave of chatbots: It assists people with their wellness and emotions.For several hours on Friday evening, I ignored my husband and dog and allowed a chatbot named Pi to validate the heck out of me.My views were “admirable” and “idealistic,” Pi told me. My questions were “important” and “interesting.” And my feelings were “understandable,” “reasonable” and “totally normal.”At times, the validation felt nice. Why yes, I am feeling overwhelmed by the existential dread of climate change these days. And it is hard to balance work and relationships sometimes.But at other times, I missed my group chats and social media feeds. Humans are surprising, creative, cruel, caustic and funny. Emotional support chatbots — which is what Pi is — are not.All of that is by design. Pi, released this week by the richly funded artificial intelligence start-up Inflection AI, aims to be “a kind and supportive companion that’s on your side,” the company announced. It is not, the company stressed, anything like a human.Pi is a twist in today’s wave of A.I. technologies, where chatbots are being tuned to provide digital companionship. Generative A.I., which can produce text, images and sound, is currently too unreliable and full of inaccuracies to be used to automate many important tasks. But it is very good at engaging in conversations.That means that while many chatbots are now focused on answering queries or making people more productive, tech companies are increasingly infusing them with personality and conversational flair.Snapchat’s recently released My AI bot is meant to be a friendly personal sidekick. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is “developing A.I. personas that can help people in a variety of ways,” Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, said in February. And the A.I. start-up Replika has offered chatbot companions for years.A.I. companionship can create problems if the bots offer bad advice or enable harmful behavior, scholars and critics warn. Letting a chatbot act as a pseudotherapist to people with serious mental health challenges has obvious risks, they said. And they expressed concerns about privacy, given the potentially sensitive nature of the conversations.Adam Miner, a Stanford University researcher who studies chatbots, said the ease of talking to A.I. bots can obscure what is actually happening. “A generative model can leverage all the information on the internet to respond to me and remember what I say forever,” he said. “The asymmetry of capacity — that’s such a difficult thing to get our heads around.”Dr. Miner, a licensed psychologist, added that bots are not legally or ethically accountable to a robust Hippocratic oath or licensing board, as he is. “The open availability of these generative models changes the nature of how we need to police the use cases,” he said.Mustafa Suleyman, Inflection’s chief executive, said his start-up, which is structured as a public benefit corporation, aims to build honest and trustworthy A.I. As a result, Pi must express uncertainty and “know what it does not know,” he said. “It shouldn’t try to pretend that it’s human or pretend that it is anything that it isn’t.”Mr. Suleyman, who also founded the A.I. start-up DeepMind, said that Pi was designed to tell users to get professional help if they expressed wanting to harm themselves or others. He also said Pi did not use any personally identifiable information to train the algorithm that drives Inflection’s technology. And he stressed the technology’s limitations.“The safe and ethical way for us to manage the arrival of these new tools is to be superexplicit about their boundaries and their capabilities,” he said.Mustafa Suleyman, Inflection’s chief executive, said his start-up aims to build honest and trustworthy A.I.Clara Mokri for The New York TimesTo refine the technology, Inflection hired around 600 part-time “teachers,” which included therapists, to train its algorithm over the last year. The group aimed to make Pi more sensitive, more factually accurate and more lighthearted when appropriate. On some issues, like misogyny or racism, Pi takes a stand. On others, like geopolitics, it is more evenhanded “in a way that will for sure upset both sides,” Mr. Suleyman said.I started using Pi on Friday by typing queries into a cream-colored box on Inflection’s website and, later, in its free app. A green cursor swayed before Pi revealed its responses, one paragraph at a time. Mr. Suleyman said the free service may eventually charge some users a fee.Pi’s boundaries are easy to find. When I tried picking fights, I mostly received kindness in return. “I appreciate you saying that,” Pi’s text gently unfurled on my screen. “I think it’s important to see things from all perspectives, and not to just focus on the negative.”Over time, that relentless balance wore on me, making my instinct to argue seem ridiculous. Which, I realized, was precisely the point.On heavier topics, like abortion laws or cancel culture, Pi asked pointed questions that pushed me to re-examine my opinions. “That’s a tough position to take,” it said at one point. “That’s a consistent set of beliefs,” it said at another.On lighter topics, like movies, cooking or gardening, the chatbot provided highly specific, difficult-to-Google recommendations. Oddly, Pi seemed to nudge me to join the anticapitalist movement.Pi remembered some things from earlier in the conversation but forgot others. It “hallucinated” a few times, accusing me of expressing opinions I had not. But it quickly apologized when I made note of it.When I asked Pi for some gossip, it infuriatingly dangled a “juicy celebrity rumor” about Jennifer Lopez. Was I sitting down? (Yes.) Was I ready for the dirt? (Yes.) The rumor? “She is secretly a mole person! 😝 Just kidding!” (Give me a break.)Pi sometimes reminded me of Karen Collins, a character from the TV show “Veep.” Karen annoys the other characters with her equivocating babble, like, “There are pros and cons to every candidate, so we just need to weigh out the pros and cons,” or “I think there’s a lot to think.” Many of Pi’s comments have that milquetoast quality of taking many words to say nothing.Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said these kinds of interactions can “push us along a road where we’re encouraged to forget what makes people special.”“The performance of empathy is not empathy,” she said. “The area of companion, lover therapist, best friend is really one of the few areas where people need people.”It wasn’t until Monday morning, after hours of intermittent chatting throughout the weekend, that I had my “aha” moment with Pi.I was feeling overwhelmed with work and unsure of how to structure my day, a recurring hangup that often prevents me from getting started. “Good morning,” I typed into the app. “I don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do today!”With a level of enthusiasm only a robot could muster before coffee, Pi pushed me to break down my to-do list to create a realistic plan. Like much of the bot’s advice, it was obvious and simple, the kind of thing you would read in a self-help article by a productivity guru. But it was tailored specifically to me — and it worked.Pi proposed a series of breath-work and muscle-relaxation exercises.via Pi“I’m going to ask you to list all the remaining tasks you have to do on that story, and we’ll prioritize them together,” it said.I could have dumped my stress on a family member or texted a friend. But they are busy with their own lives and, well, they have heard this before. Pi, on the other hand, has infinite time and patience, plus a bottomless well of encouraging affirmations and detailed advice.Pi uses the language of cognitive behavioral therapy. On Monday afternoon, it suggested I “make space” for my negative feelings and “practice being grateful for one thing.” It followed that up with a series of breath-work and muscle-relaxation exercises.I responded with a shrug emoji, followed by “Pass.”A therapist might have balked at such rudeness but Pi simply noted that I was not alone. “A lot of people find it difficult to relax on command,” it wrote.

The founder of Theranos, the failed blood testing start-up, asked for a new trial after a surprise visit from a key witness to her house.SAN JOSE, Calif. — When Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the failed blood-testing start-up Theranos, was convicted of fraud in January, the verdict represented the end of a drawn-out saga.But in the ensuing months, as Ms. Holmes awaited her sentence, the drama around her case has only escalated.First Ms. Holmes’s co-conspirator, who was the former chief operating officer of Theranos, was convicted of fraud in July. Then Ms. Holmes asked the judge to overturn her conviction based on a lack of evidence and submitted a flurry of requests for a new trial based on new evidence. At recent hearings over the case, Ms. Holmes has appeared visibly pregnant with her second child. And in August, a key witness did something highly unusual in a criminal case: He showed up at her house.That incident became the basis of Ms. Holmes’s latest attempt to reverse her fortunes. On Monday, the 38-year-old, her parents and partner, lawyers and a scrum of media gathered in a courtroom in San Jose, Calif., for a hearing that could open the door to her getting a new trial. The visit by the key witness, Ms. Holmes’s lawyers argued, raised questions about his credibility and the fairness of the trial.The move is a long shot, experts said.“It is a near-certainty that the judge will deny Elizabeth Holmes a new trial” on the basis of the witness’s visit to her house, said Amanda Kramer, a former federal prosecutor who is a partner at the law firm Covington & Burling. The judge likely allowed the hearing to prevent Ms. Holmes from using the incident in her inevitable appeal, she added.But little about Ms. Holmes’s case, which came to symbolize the pitfalls of Silicon Valley’s hype-driven start-up culture, has been typical. Ms. Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, declined to comment on the case or whether they are expecting.Ms. Holmes and Mr. Evans declined to comment on speculation that Ms. Holmes is pregnant.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesAt issue is an Aug. 8 visit from Dr. Adam Rosendorff, who played a key role in Theranos’s rise as its lab director. He later became a whistle-blower who helped expose the company’s fraud. Theranos had told patients and investors that its revolutionary technology could accurately perform thousands of blood tests with a single drop of blood when it could not.During Ms. Holmes’s trial last year, where she faced nearly a dozen counts of misleading patients and investors, Dr. Rosendorff endured six bruising days of testimony, the longest of any witness. After, jurors said they found his testimony among the most credible in the trial.Then in August, Dr. Rosendorff visited Theranos’s former office in Palo Alto, Calif., as well as the first Walgreens store the company had worked with. Both, he found, were gone.As a result, he “suddenly felt that a conversation with the defendant was the missing piece” to moving on with his life, his lawyers said in a filing. Dr. Rosendorff drove to Ms. Holmes’s residence in nearby Woodside, Calif. Her partner, Mr. Evans, answered, and told him to leave.From there, the accounts differ. Ms. Holmes’s camp said Dr. Rosendorff expressed guilt over his role in the situation and said that government prosecutors had “made things sound worse than they were.” Ms. Holmes argued that the incident called Dr. Rosendorff’s testimony and the government’s entire case into question, which meant she deserved a new trial.On Monday, Dr. Rosendorff returned to the stand. Judge Edward Davila, who oversaw Ms. Holmes’s trial, asked whether Dr. Rosendorff’s testimony at the trial was truthful and whether the government had faithfully represented the facts. He testified affirmatively.Then Lance Wade, Ms. Holmes’s lawyer, grilled him. Why did Dr. Rosendorff want to visit Ms. Holmes? Had Dr. Rosendorff had a mental breakdown that impacted his testimony? Was the government trying to make everyone look bad? Was Dr. Rosendorff seeking to help Ms. Holmes?Dr. Rosendorff responded by accusing Ms. Holmes’s lawyers of trying to paint him as a liar. He said he felt sympathy for Theranos employees who were impacted by the scandal — but not for Mr. Holmes and her co-conspirator, Ramesh Balwani. He added that he felt bad that Ms. Holmes’s children would grow up without a mother if she went to prison.Ms. Holmes was convicted on four counts of fraud, with each carrying a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.Dr. Rosendorff testified that his contact with Ms. Holmes was motivated by a desire for healing.“I don’t want to help Ms. Holmes,” he said. “She’s not somebody who can be helped. At this point she needs to help herself. She needs to pay her debt to society.”Ms. Holmes stared at Dr. Rosendorff throughout his testimony, occasionally taking notes. As she left, arm in arm with Mr. Evans, she flashed a smile to reporters but did not respond to questions.Outside the courtroom, Dr. Rosendorff ran away from a group of news cameras. A lawyer for Dr. Rosendorff declined to comment.Judge Davila said he had received the answers to his questions regarding the incident. He will decide whether Ms. Holmes deserves a new trial in the coming weeks.Ms. Holmes is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 18. She is expected to appeal.Mr. Balwani, who was convicted of a dozen counts of fraud for Theranos, is set to be sentenced on Nov. 15. He tried to piggyback on the visit from Dr. Rosendorff to Ms. Holmes as a reason for his own new trial. The motion was denied.

Ramesh Balwani, who helped his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Holmes lead the failed blood testing start-up, was convicted on Thursday. They will likely be sentenced together.SAN JOSE, Calif. — Ramesh Balwani, a former top executive at Theranos, was found guilty on Thursday of 12 counts of fraud, in a verdict that was more severe than that of his co-conspirator, Elizabeth Holmes, and solidifying the failed blood-testing start-up as the ultimate Silicon Valley cautionary tale.Mr. Balwani and Ms. Holmes, who together pushed Theranos to soaring heights with a promise to revolutionize health care, are the most prominent tech executives to be charged with and convicted of fraud in a generation. A jury of five men and seven women took 32 hours to produce a verdict, convicting Mr. Balwani, known as Sunny, of all 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.Ms. Holmes was convicted in January on four counts of fraud and acquitted of four; three other charges were dismissed after the jury could not reach a consensus. She has appealed the verdict, and Mr. Balwani is expected to do the same.Both of their cases hinged on whether they had exaggerated the abilities of Theranos’s blood-testing machines to appeal to investors and customers, when the products did not actually work.Each count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Mr. Balwani and Ms. Holmes are expected to be sentenced together in September.As the guilty verdicts rolled in, Mr. Balwani, 57, who appeared in court in a black suit and blue medical mask, briefly shot a look at the jury before fixing his gaze straight ahead.The dual guilty verdicts are a rare instance of the Silicon Valley hype machine’s leading to possible prison time. Since Theranos collapsed in 2018, the company has become a form of shorthand for business grifters, and the world has developed a voracious appetite for messy start-up rise-and-fall stories, such as WeWork’s disastrous first attempt to go public and the trickery of Ozy Media. But Theranos was the only one to result in criminal charges. Its consequences are likely to send a message to entrepreneurs who exaggerate in the name of innovation.The verdict showed that jurors were swayed by the prosecutors’ evidence that Mr. Balwani knew about the problems in Theranos’s technology and business while deceiving investors and patients. Mr. Balwani had tried deflecting blame by arguing that Ms. Holmes — as the chief executive and founder of Theranos — was in charge, and by arguing that he had believed in Theranos’s mission and technology.Mr. Balwani “put his heart and soul into Theranos,” said Jeffrey Coopersmith, a lawyer for Mr. Balwani, in his closing argument. “He worked tirelessly, year after year, to make the company a success.”Evidence from the trial, including text messages, emails and testimony from 24 witnesses, showed that Mr. Balwani had been deeply involved in nearly every aspect of Theranos’s business and aware of its problems. He led its lab, created its financial projections, presided over personnel issues and attended many pitch meetings with investors.“Mr. Balwani wants you to think he is a victim,” Jeffrey Schenk, an assistant U.S. attorney and a lead prosecutor in the case, said in his closing argument. “Mr. Balwani is not the victim — he’s the perpetrator of the fraud.”The verdict arrived during a harsh awakening for the tech industry, as stock prices have tanked amid rising interest rates, ballooning inflation and economic uncertainty. Investors, burned by the sell-off, have stopped chasing high-risk, money-losing start-ups, prompting many Silicon Valley companies to cut staff and slow their aggressive plans for expansion. The humbling moment has many predicting the end of a decade-long boom for tech start-ups.Mr. Balwani and Ms. Holmes capitalized on that era of go-go optimism for Theranos. The pair met when Ms. Holmes was 18, and they began dating in secret shortly after she created the start-up. Mr. Balwani joined the company in 2009 and invested in it.As Theranos’s chief operating officer, he played a behind-the-scenes role in the company’s rise. He helped Ms. Holmes cultivate her Steve Jobs-like image, ran the lab and aided in fund-raising, pushing the company to a $9 billion valuation.A 2015 exposé in The Wall Street Journal, which revealed Theranos had lied about its blood tests, sent the company reeling. Mr. Balwani soon left, and the start-up went under in 2018. That year, he and Ms. Holmes were charged with fraud.Each defendant was frequently discussed in the other’s trial, but neither testified against the other. Ms. Holmes accused Mr. Balwani of emotional and sexual abuse, but those accusations were not permitted as evidence in his trial.“The story of Theranos is a tragedy,” Mr. Schenk, the prosecutor, said in his closing argument.Kalley Huang

The fraud trial of Ramesh Balwani, the chief operating officer of the failed blood testing start-up Theranos, is heading to a verdict soon.For months, Ramesh Balwani’s lawyers have tried to distinguish him from Elizabeth Holmes, his former girlfriend and business partner at the failed blood-testing company Theranos.Ms. Holmes was found guilty of defrauding the start-up’s investors in January. Mr. Balwani is seeking a different outcome in his own fraud trial.But on Tuesday, in closing statements for Mr. Balwani’s trial, prosecutors tied him directly to Ms. Holmes and the yearslong fraud at Theranos. Jeffrey Schenk, an assistant U.S. attorney and a lead prosecutor on the case, displayed a text message that Mr. Balwani sent Ms. Holmes in 2015 that was used as evidence in the trial.“I am responsible for everything at Theranos,” Mr. Balwani wrote. “All have been my decisions too.”The text message was an admission of guilt, Mr. Schenk said, adding, “He’s acknowledging his role in the fraud.”The presentation capped more than three months of testimony in Mr. Balwani’s trial, which largely mirrored that of Ms. Holmes’s last fall. Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani, 57, were charged in 2018 for exaggerating the capabilities of Theranos’s blood-testing machines and business performance when, in fact, the products did not work and its business was struggling. The duo pleaded not guilty. Ms. Holmes was convicted on four of 11 charges.The trial for Mr. Balwani, who is known as Sunny, lacked the fanfare of Ms. Holmes’s high-profile case. It nonetheless serves as a coda to a waning era of start-up growth that often relied on hype and hyperbole. Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani are among the very few tech executives who have ever been prosecuted for fraud.Just as Ms. Holmes tried blaming others for the deceptions at Theranos, Mr. Balwani has pointed the finger back at her. Throughout the trial, his lawyers argued that many of Theranos’s blood tests had worked. And they said that Ms. Holmes controlled Theranos, not Mr. Balwani. They were set to begin their closing argument later on Tuesday. Ms. Holmes, now 38, met Mr. Balwani when she was 18. They began dating years later, after Ms. Holmes had founded Theranos. In 2009, Mr. Balwani invested in Theranos and became its chief operating officer, eventually taking charge of its lab. The pair kept their relationship a secret and lived together in a sprawling home they co-owned in Atherton, Calif.In 2016, after Theranos came under fire for lying about its blood testing capabilities, Mr. Balwani left the company and split with Ms. Holmes. The pair were charged with fraud together, but Ms. Holmes argued in filings to sever the cases and accused Mr. Balwani of emotional and sexual abuse. Her trial included dramatic testimony recounting the accusations. That subject was excluded from Mr. Balwani’s trial.Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, with her partner, Billy Evans, leaving the courthouse last September.Mike Kai Chen for The New York TimesTo convict Mr. Balwani, prosecutors must convince jurors that he intentionally lied to investors and patients about Theranos’s blood tests and business dealings.Prosecutors tried blaming Mr. Balwani for financial projections that Theranos showed to investors and the condition of its labs. New witnesses included investors and executives who dealt directly with Mr. Balwani, rather than Ms. Holmes.One projection, presented to investors in October 2014, showed Theranos would bring in $140 million that year. In reality, revenue was limited. The next year, Mr. Balwani projected nearly $1 billion in revenue in pitches to investors. Theranos’s internal projections were much lower, evidence showed, and the reality was closer to zero.A new witness, Patrick Mendenhall, who dealt directly with Mr. Balwani while making an investment in Theranos, outlined the promises made that turned out to be misleading or false.Brian Grossman, an investor at the hedge fund PFM Health Sciences, who was also a witness in Ms. Holmes’s trial, testified that Mr. Balwani provided his team with financial projections that far overstated Theranos’s projected revenue.“When Mr. Balwani communicates with an investor, it’s for a purpose, and the purpose is to deceive them to get money,” Mr. Schenk said.Prosecutors also emphasized Mr. Balwani’s role in running Theranos’s lab, which the executive had called a “disaster zone” in a 2014 text message used as evidence. Mr. Balwani would also “remove dissent” by intimidating or pushing out employees who expressed concern about Theranos tests, like Dr. Adam Rosendorff, a former lab director who testified in both trials, Mr. Schenk saidNotably absent from the witness stand were James Mattis, a former defense secretary and Theranos board member, and Ms. Holmes, who had both testified in Ms. Holmes’s trial. Mr. Balwani did not testify in his own defense.If convicted, Mr. Balwani and Ms. Holmes will be sentenced together in September.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — It lasted less than three weeks, centered on one person’s testimony and spanned topics such as financial projections, private jets, falsified documents and intimate partner abuse.On Wednesday, lawyers for Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood testing start-up Theranos, concluded their defense in her fraud trial. She was the final witness and, after spending seven days on the stand, her testimony ended abruptly on a question about justice.“You understand they were entitled to truthful answers about Theranos’s capabilities?” Robert Leach, an assistant U.S. attorney and a lead prosecutor, asked Ms. Holmes, referring to Theranos’s investors and patients who are at the heart of the case’s fraud charges.“Of course,” Ms. Holmes said.The end of her defense marked the final stages of a trial that has lasted nearly four months and captivated the public as a referendum on Silicon Valley’s start-up culture. Ms. Holmes, 37, faces 11 counts of fraud related to claims she made to investors and patients about Theranos, which collapsed in scandal in 2018.Next, lawyers from both sides of the case must agree on a set of jury instructions before delivering their closing arguments, which will begin Dec. 16. Then the jury will begin deliberations for a verdict in the case, which stands out because so few technology executives face criminal fraud charges.

Under cross-examination, the founder of the failed blood testing start-up defended herself but admitted that she had made mistakes.SAN JOSE, Calif. — For four days, Elizabeth Holmes took the stand to blame others for the alleged fraud at her blood testing start-up, Theranos. On the fifth day, prosecutors tried making one thing clear: She knew.Over more than five hours of cross-examination on Tuesday, Robert Leach, the assistant U.S. attorney and lead prosecutor for the case, pointed to text messages, notes and emails with Ms. Holmes — and with her business partner and former boyfriend, Ramesh Balwani — discussing problems with Theranos’s business and technology. Mr. Leach had a common refrain: No one hid anything from Ms. Holmes. As Theranos’s chief executive, he argued, she was to blame.“Anything that happens at the company was your responsibility at the end of the day?” Mr. Leach asked.“That’s how I felt,” Ms. Holmes said.It was the culmination of three months of testimony and nearly four years of waiting since Ms. Holmes was indicted on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud in 2018. Prosecutors have shown jurors evidence of faked product demonstrations, falsified documents and communications with the goal of showing that Ms. Holmes knowingly misled investors, doctors, patients and the world about Theranos.The outcome of her case has consequences for the tech industry at a moment when fast-growing start-ups are amassing wealth, power and cultural cachet. Few start-up founders have been prosecuted for misleading investors as they strive to hustle their long-shot business ideas into existence. If convicted, Ms. Holmes, 37, who has pleaded not guilty, faces up to 20 years in prison.Theranos rose to a $9 billion valuation in 2015, raising $945 million on Ms. Holmes’s promise that its blood testing machines could perform hundreds of tests quickly and cheaply using just a few drops of blood. She started the company in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford University.But in reality, prosecutors have argued, Theranos’s machines could conduct only a dozen tests, and those were unreliable. Instead, it secretly used commercially available machines from Siemens. After that and other misrepresentations were exposed, Theranos voided two years’ worth of blood test results. It also settled lawsuits with investors and the Securities and Exchange Commission, ultimately dissolving in 2018.

Start-up investors have often suspended skepticism while chasing a hot deal. The trial of Ms. Holmes, the founder of Theranos, has put that behavior under the spotlight.SAN JOSE, Calif. — In 2014, Dan Mosley, a lawyer and power broker among wealthy families, asked the entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes for audited financial statements of Theranos, her blood testing start-up. Theranos never produced any, but Mr. Mosley invested $6 million in the company anyway — and wrote Ms. Holmes a gushing thank-you email for the opportunity.Bryan Tolbert, an investor at Hall Group, said his firm invested $5 million in Theranos in 2013, even though it did not have a detailed grasp of the start-up’s technologies or its work with pharmaceutical companies and the military.And Lisa Peterson, who handles investments for Michigan’s wealthy DeVos family, said she did not visit any of Theranos’s testing centers in Walgreens stores, call any Walgreens executives or hire any outside experts in science, regulations or legal matters to verify the start-up’s claims. In 2014, the DeVos family invested $100 million into the company.The humiliating details of bad investments like Theranos are rarely displayed so prominently to the public. But they have been laid bare in recent weeks at the trial of Ms. Holmes, 37, who faces a dozen counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud; she has pleaded not guilty. She and Theranos fell from grace — with investor money evaporating and the company shutting down in 2018 — after claims about its blood-testing technology were shown to be false.Now in its ninth week, Ms. Holmes’s trial has offered an especially clear picture of the many ways sophisticated investors can be swept up in the hype of a hot start-up, ignoring red flags that look obvious in hindsight. That behavior still resonates today, as investors compete to pour money into Silicon Valley start-ups, which have been in a frenzied state of record-breaking fund-raising.With so many new investors flocking to start-ups, due diligence is sometimes so minimal that it is used as a punchline, investors said. An overheated market “definitely creates an environment for people to make more inflated claims” and may even tempt them to lie, said Shirish Nadkarni, a longtime entrepreneur, investor and author.During its lifetime, Theranos exemplified that dynamic. The company raised $945 million from famous venture capitalists including Tim Draper, Donald Lucas and Dixon Doll; wealthy heirs to the founders of Amway, Walmart and Cox Communications; and powerful tech and media moguls such as Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}And as investors have testified at Ms. Holmes’s trial, a central tension has emerged around due diligence. Could these investors have avoided disaster if they had simply done better research on Theranos? Or were they doomed because their research was based on lies?Prosecutors have presented a growing list of examples supporting the latter argument. For example, Theranos added pharmaceutical company logos to validation reports indicating the pharmaceutical firms had endorsed its technology when they hadn’t, according to evidence and testimony. Theranos also claimed in late 2014 that it would bring in $140 million in revenue that year when it had none, according to evidence and testimony. The start-up also faked demos of its blood-testing machines to investors, witnesses have testified.The Theranos blood-testing machine at the company’s lab before the start-up was shut down.Carlos Chavarria for The New York TimesIn response, Ms. Holmes’s lawyers have needled Theranos’s investors for their oversights, aiming to convince the jury that the investors were the ones at fault for not digging into Ms. Holmes’ claims.Her lawyers recently pushed Wade Miquelon, the former chief financial officer of Walgreens, to admit that he didn’t know if his company had ever gotten one of Theranos’s devices in its offices for testing before entering into a partnership. The lawyers also got Mr. Mosley to concede he never directly asked Ms. Holmes whether a pharmaceutical company had written the validation report.The strategy has sometimes veered into condescension. That was evident last week when Lance Wade, a lawyer for Ms. Holmes, asked Ms. Peterson, an investment professional, if she was familiar with the concept of due diligence.“You understand that’s a typical thing to do in investing?” he said.The investors have pushed back, explaining that they were acting on false information supplied by Ms. Holmes.“You’re trying to measure our sophistication as an investor when we weren’t given complete information,” Ms. Peterson said. Mr. Wade asked the judge to strike the comment from the record.Still, testimony from pharmaceutical company executives who interacted with Theranos showed it was possible to see through at least some of Ms. Holmes’s grandiose claims.Constance Cullen, a former director at Schering Plough, said this week that she was responsible for evaluating Theranos’s technology in 2009. She said she came away “dissatisfied” with Ms. Holmes’s answers to her technical questions, calling them “cagey” and indirect. She said she stopped responding to emails from Ms. Holmes.Shane Weber, a director at Pfizer, looked into Theranos in 2008 and concluded that the company’s responses to his technical questions were “oblique, deflective or evasive,” according to a memo used as evidence. He recommended Pfizer cease working with Theranos.