Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood-testing startup company Theranos, is no longer one of America’s richest self-made women.
Forbes revised its estimate of Holmes’ net worth from $4.5 billion to exactly $0 on Wednesday, effectively knocking her off the 2016 list of the richest, most successful, self-made women in America.
Theranos, which was originally valued at $9 billion, garnered attention in recent years as being a company that could revolutionize the blood testing industry by conducting tests from a single prick of a finger at a fraction of the cost of standard methods.
But Theranos and Holmes, 32, have come under fire over the past year following scrutiny from a number of federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration. A series of articles from the Wall Street Journal also investigated the company and reported, most recently, that Holmes had voided two years worth of blood test results.
Theranos has also not published any papers in scientific journals demonstrating the accuracy of its methods and tests.
“Holmes has been promising to publish data for six months, but hadn’t submitted a single paper as of April,” Forbes wrote as part of its justification for dramatically lowering her net worth.
Forbes reestimated the company to be worth $800 million. Although Holmes still owns half of it, outside investors who own preferred shares in the company have a much larger stake than she does.
Still, Holmes is scheduled to present Theranos’ data this August to the AACC — formerly known as the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, and Theranos has disputed Forbes’ reevaluation.
“As a privately held company, we declined to share confidential information with Forbes,” Theranos spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said in an email statement to the New York Times. “As a result, the article was based exclusively on speculation and press reports.”