Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is currently serving a reduced 9-year prison sentence (down from 11 years and 3 months) after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy in November 2022. Viewers got a glimpse into how the disgraced biotechnology entrepreneur ended up in prison through The Dropout. The Hulu miniseries, which premiered in March 2022, stars Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, with Naveen Andrews portraying Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the man who co-founded the controversial blood-testing tech startup. While Holmes became the public face of the scandal – with her black turtleneck becoming as iconic as Steve Jobs‘ – Balwani has largely stayed out of the spotlight.
So, who is Sunny Balwani? Learn more about the man below.
As The New York Times noted in Nov. 2021, very little is known about Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani compared to the documentary and podcast series based around Elizabeth and her time with Theranos.
“Sunny Balwani is an extraordinary person,” Jeff Coopersmith, Balwani’s attorney, told ABC News. “He was born in Pakistan to a Hindu family, and eventually, the family had to move to India because being a Hindu in a mostly all-Muslim country of Pakistan was very difficult. When he got to the United States, he literally kissed the ground and studied at the University of Texas, where he got a degree in computer science. Everything he ever did in his life he got through earning it through incredibly hard work. He was the most hard working person pretty much I’ve ever met.”
Before helping Holmes launch Theranos – a company that promised its machines could run standard blood tests on just a few drops from a finger prick, per The Guardian – Balwani was already involved in the tech world. He was a Northern California sales manager for Microsoft, according to The New York Times. During the early dot-com boom, he joined a startup called CommercBid.com.
CommerceBid built platforms that pit suppliers against each other to drive down costs. It was bought by Commerce One for $225 million. When the dot-com bubble burst, Balwani made out with a reported $40 million. After going back to school, he became the chief operating officer at Theranos.
In June 2018, Holmes and Balwani were indicted on federal wire fraud charges over a multi-million dollar scheme to defund investors, according to CNN. Both pleaded not guilty. In January 2022, a jury found Holmes guilty of four of eleven charges – one count of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud tied to specific investors. She’s acquitted on three charges concerning defrauding patients and one conspiracy charge. The jury was unable to render a verdict on three of the other charges.
