Elizabeth Holmes told a California court yesterday that there was no explanation as to why investors were shown a revenue projection for 2015 of nearly $1 billion for Theranos, when internal estimates were far lower.
During her sixth day on the witness stand Holmes, 37, who is charged with 12 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, was shown testimony from Lisa Peterson, a representative for the DeVos family office, a Theranos investor, by Robert Leach, assistant US attorney. She denies all the charges.
Holmes, who was 19 when she started Theranos, denies all the charges. The now defunct Theranos promised to revolutionise healthcare with technology that it said required only a few drops of blood to conduct hundreds of medical tests.
Peterson had testified about a document showing projected revenue of $990 million for 2015 to which Holmes replied that the figure came from a financial model that was discussed with that investor, but said that she did not think she was the one who discussed it with them, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first began raising questions about the accuracy of Theranos’s technology in 2015.
Looking at the document, Leach pointed to a projection of $40 million for 2015 from pharmaceutical company contracts alone. Holmes agreed Theranos had no revenue from pharmaceutical companies in 2014. Asked how it would be possible to then get to $40 million, Holmes replied that it could have been expected revenue from a GlaxoSmithKline contract signed years earlier.
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Leach reminded Holmes of testimony from Theranos’s former comptroller saying that no money came in from GSK from 2007 to 2013. He asked about each year separately, with Holmes affirming each time that no, Theranos had no GSK revenue that year.
Earlier yesterday Holmes said that she never told any potential investors or business partners that Theranos devices were being used on medical helicopters or actively by the military.
She confirmed that Theranos technology was never used in medevacs, never deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq and never used in any way to assist soldiers on the battlefield.
