Theranos Inc.’s 15-year odyssey to revolutionize the blood-testing business began with huge promise but has been engulfed by ignominy. 
 
 Company founder Elizabeth Holmes, widely hailed as Silicon Valley’s first female billionaire startup founder, agreed to a settlement with federal regulators that strips her of voting control of Theranos, bans her from being an officer or director of any public company for 10 years and requires her to pay a $500,000 penalty. 
 
 ... ||||| FILE- In this Nov. 2, 2015, file photo, Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos, speaks at the Fortune Global Forum in San Francisco. On Wednesday, March 14, 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission... (Associated Press) 
 
 NEW YORK (AP) — Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford University dropout once billed as the "next Steve Jobs," has forfeited control of Theranos, the blood-testing startup she founded, and will pay $500,000 to settle charges that she oversaw a "massive fraud." 
 
 Under an agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Holmes is barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years. The SEC said Wednesday that it will pursue its case against the president of the company, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, in federal court. 
 
 The settlement comes two years after the SEC, prompted by a Wall Street Journal investigation, began looking into claims Theranos had made about its potentially revolutionary blood-testing technology. 
 
 The Journal quoted former employees that suspected the technology was a fraud, and it found that the company was using routine blood-testing equipment for the vast majority of its tests. The story raised concerns about the accuracy of Theranos' blood testing technology, which put patients at risk of having conditions either misdiagnosed or ignored. 
 
 Holmes, 34, founded Theranos in Palo Alto, California, in 2003, pitching the company's technology as a cheaper way to run dozens of blood tests. Once considered the nation's youngest female billionaire, Holmes said she was inspired to start the company in response to her fear of needles. 
 
 Theranos raised millions in startup funding by promoting its tests as costing a "fraction" of what other labs charge. 
 
 At the center of Theranos' mystique was its "Edison" machine, which the company claimed could test for a variety of diseases through only a few drops of blood from a person's finger. Despite the hype and company claims, Theranos shared few details on how its Edison machine — named after the inventor — worked. 
 
 Theranos attracted extraordinary interest and loaded its board with huge names, mainly elder Washington statesmen, including two former U.S. secretaries of state: Henry Kissinger and George Schultz. The group was criticized for lacking expertise in science or medicine. 
 
 Holmes kept strict control over her image, wearing only black turtleneck sweaters in public, much like Steve Jobs, was subject of several fawning profiles in business magazines and tech-focused news outlets. 
 
 Theranos' intrigue went beyond just investors and the media. In 2015, Holmes was able to convince the Arizona State Legislature and Gov. Doug Ducey to pass a law allowing patients to get blood tests without a doctor's order, for the direct benefit of Theranos. The company got Walgreens to open store-within-a-store concepts where customers could get their blood tested by Theranos. 
 
 After the Journal's investigation, Theranos and Holmes pushed back hard, and for months refused to acknowledge that its machines were effectively a sham. State and federal authorities started investigations into the accuracy of the company's blood testing work. In 2016 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees blood testing labs in the U.S., banned Holmes from operating a lab and revoked Theranos' blood testing license. 
 
 In late 2016, Theranos began shutting down its clinical labs and wellness centers and laid off more than 40 percent of its full-time employees. The company has been on life support ever since, and is rumored to be close to bankruptcy. 
 
 Along with the fine announced Wednesday, Holmes agreed to return 18.9 million shares of Theranos that she obtained during the fraud. If the company is sold or liquidated in bankruptcy, Holmes will not profit from any remaining ownership in the company until at least $750 million in proceeds are returned to investors, the SEC said. 
 
 Theranos said Wednesday that neither the company nor Holmes admitted or denied wrongdoing. 
 
 "The company is pleased to be bringing this matter to a close and looks forward to advancing its technology," Theranos said in a prepared statement. ||||| Theranos, led by CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes, raised more than $700 million on the promise of a revolutionary blood-testing technology that never materialized. The Securities and Exchange Commission just charged Holmes with “massive fraud.” 
 
 Lisa Lake / Getty Images Elizabeth Holmes in 2015 
 
 Elizabeth Holmes once dazzled the world with a story that seemed almost too good to be true: Theranos, her Silicon Valley startup, was going to revolutionize medicine with its blood-testing technology. Now Holmes’ corporation — once valued at $9 billion — has crumbled. On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Theranos, Holmes, and Ramesh Balwani, the startup’s former president, with “massive fraud.” They are accused of raising more than $700 million from 2013 to 2015 through an “elaborate, years-long” series of lies and exaggerations about the company’s business, finances, and technology. Theranos and Holmes have agreed to settle the fraud charges. Pending court approval, the CEO and founder will pay a $500,000 penalty, surrender nearly 19 million shares for a significant cut in equity, and give up majority voting control of Theranos. She’ll also be barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years. Balwani’s claims will be litigated in court. “The Theranos story is an important lesson for Silicon Valley,” Jina Choi, director of the SEC’s San Francisco Regional Office, said in a statement. “Innovators who seek to revolutionize and disrupt an industry must tell investors the truth about what their technology can do today, not just what they hope it might do someday.” Here are the biggest lies and exaggerations that Holmes, Theranos, and Balwani told, all according to the SEC. Theranos did not return a request for comment. 1. The fundamental falsehood: Theranos’s blood-testing technology simply didn’t do what the company repeatedly told investors, clients, and the media it could, the SEC alleged. Holmes’ story was irresistible: Her special machine could run hundreds of blood tests on just a few drops of blood. And this machine — which in later versions was called the miniLab — was supposedly faster, cheaper, and more accurate than all the other blood-testing lab equipment out there. But even though Theranos said it could run 200 tests, Holmes and the rest of the company knew that their machine could only do a dozen or so, the SEC alleged. For the vast majority of its tests, Theranos in fact was using equipment already on the market. Yet Holmes hid this crucial fact and told investors that Theranos only used its own equipment. 
 
 Mike Windle / Getty Images NBC News' Maria Shriver interviews Holmes at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2015. 
 
 2. Theranos gave fake demonstrations when it was striking deals with one of its major clients, Walgreens. According to the SEC, Holmes struck up major deals to put miniLabs in Walgreens and Safeway stores based on fraudulent claims about how Theranos’s technology worked. (The SEC complaint refers to them as a “large national pharmacy chain” and “a large national grocery chain.”) But according to the SEC, Holmes didn’t just say that the technology worked — she also went to great lengths to make it look like it worked. In July and August 2013, Theranos did demonstrations for Walgreens executives before the miniLabs’ store launch. Holmes told her employees to put Theranos’s equipment in the room where they were collecting blood samples from the executives — but instead of processing the blood on the Theranos machines, employees secretly ran some tests on outside lab equipment, according to the SEC. Based on those presentations, at the end of 2013, Walgreens executives agreed to more quickly hand over a portion of a $100 million “innovation fee” to help Theranos roll out in the stores faster. But those testing centers also relied on outside lab equipment. No one at Theranos ever told the executives the truth, according to the SEC. Holmes kept up the charade for years, telling investors that the partnerships with Walgreens and Safeway were thriving, when in fact they’d stalled as executives started to have concerns. In 2016, Walgreens sued Theranos, seeking $140 million to recover what it had put into the partnership (the lawsuit was reportedly settled for less than $30 million). Walgreens once hosted about 40 Theranos blood-testing centers. Safeway broke off its deal after spending $350 million to build clinics for Theranos’s tests in more than 800 supermarkets; Theranos never ran any tests in Safeway stores. 
 
 Jp Yim / Getty Images Former president Bill Clinton speaks to Elizabeth Holmes in 2015 in New York City. 
 
 3. Theranos also gave investors fake demonstrations and misleading information about its clinical trials. When visiting Theranos, potential investors would have their blood sampled and taken away for processing, leaving them with the impression that it was being tested on one of Theranos’s devices. But Theranos often tested the blood on outside equipment because its own equipment wasn’t capable of doing all the tests it was offering, according to the SEC. (At one point, Holmes and Balwani told one investor that Theranos could process tests for more than 1,000 conditions.) Investors also got binders with information on clinical trials that Theranos had supposedly run with pharmaceutical companies. The reports “prominently featured the company logos of well-known pharmaceutical companies, suggesting that the reports were drafted by these pharmaceutical companies,” according to the SEC. But only one report was cowritten by a pharmaceutical company. The other two were actually written by Theranos employees. From late 2013 to 2015, investors pumped more than $700 million into the company in two financing rounds. 
 
 Mike Blake / Reuters 
 
 4. Holmes lied about Theranos’s military contracts. Holmes told multiple investors that Theranos’s technology had been deployed by the US Department of Defense in the battlefield, in Afghanistan, and on medevac helicopters that transported casualties. It’s true that Theranos’s technology was used in a Department of Defense burn study — but it was never actually used in the battlefield, in Afghanistan, or on medevac helicopters. 
 
 Mike Blake / Reuters 
 
 5. Theranos said it was going to make $100 million in a year when it made about $100,000. Theranos told investors it was going to generate more than $100 million in revenue and break even in 2014, and that it was on track to generate $1 billion in 2015. That rosy picture couldn’t have been further from the truth. The company in fact had just over $100,000 in revenue in 2014, and was “nowhere near” generating $100 million by year’s end, according to the SEC. 
 
 Steve Jennings / Getty Images 
 
 6. Holmes said that Theranos didn’t need to get FDA approval. It did. From 2013 to 2015, Holmes repeatedly told potential investors that Theranos didn’t need to get FDA approval for its equipment and tests, but was voluntarily applying for it anyway because it was the “gold standard.” But in late 2013 and throughout 2014, the FDA told Holmes, in meetings and in letters, that approval was in fact necessary. So Holmes submitted Theranos’s tests to the FDA for clearance — while raising money and telling investors that the process was voluntary. 
 
 Forbes
– She was the first female founder of a Silicon Valley startup to become a billionaire before it all came crashing down. Now Elizabeth Holmes' personal fortune is gone, and she has just settled with federal regulators who say her company, Theranos, lied to investors about its supposedly revolutionary blood-testing equipment. Holmes, 34, forfeits control of the company, is barred from serving as an officer or director of any public company for a decade, and must pay $500,000, reports the AP. And her troubles may be just beginning. The Wall Street Journal reports that she still faces a criminal investigation being led by the US attorney's office in San Francisco. Details and developments: The biggest lies: BuzzFeed runs down the seven biggest Theranos lies, and they revolve around one central one: claims that its "special machine could run hundreds of blood tests on just a few drops of blood." A stunt involving Walgreens, a former partner, is illustrative. Theranos collected blood samples from Walgreens execs but processed those samples in outside lab equipment. The wowed Walgreens execs, however, were led to believe the blood was processed on the Theranos equipment in the meeting room, per BuzzFeed.