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Inside the Shockingly Modest Former Apartment of Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and former CEO of blood-testing company Theranos, is leaving behind her apartment on Lombard Street, the famous San Francisco road with as many twists and turns as the scandal surrounding her defunct Silicon Valley startup. While the actual apartment is not located on the block with the iconic hairpin turns, we were still curious to get a glimpse of the place she once called home.

The story of Holmes’ rise and fall as an exec whose claims of cutting-edge technology turned out to be false was recently the subject of an HBO documentary, “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.” But Holmes’ personal life has been shrouded in mystery ever since news broke last year that she is to stand criminal trial on charges of fraud.

During her heyday at Theranos, Holmes lived in a lavish mansion in Los Altos, CA, near her company’s headquarters. Her most recent residence, though, is a big comedown.

Holmes recently moved out of the two-bed, two-bath apartment in Russian Hill, a unit that is now available for rent for $5,395 per month. CNBC first reported that Holmes lived at Lombard Place Apartments with her fiance, Billy Evans, an heir to a California hotel chain, and her Siberian husky, Balto. It’s not clear how long she had been living there.

According to the listing on RentSFNow, this unit has “Beauty, Grace and Views that Kill.” Indeed, the listing photos show that some of its bay windows look out over the city and beyond to the Golden Gate Bridge.

But beyond the great views and desirable location, it’s clear that Holmes has fallen a long way since 2014, when Forbes named her the youngest and richest self-made female billionaire in the U.S. That was based on a $9 billion valuation of Theranos, which falsely claimed to revolutionize blood testing by using just a small sampling of blood from a pinprick at the tip of a finger. The next year, however, a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal started to unravel the myth of Theranos’ new technology.

San Francisco is bracing for a wave of new tech IPO millionaires, some of whom may aspire to the $12 million mansion owned by Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel or Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg‘s $10 million pied-à-terre in the quiet San Francisco neighborhood of Noe Valley.

But Holmes never achieved that level of wealth. In June 2018, she and former Theranos President Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were charged with 11 counts of conspiracy and wire fraud. The company shut down a few months later.

Meanwhile, coverage of the scandal keeps coming, including “The Dropout,” a podcast by ABC Radio, and upcoming dramatizations for big and small screens starring Jennifer Lawrence and Kate McKinnon.

Don’t get us wrong, though—this is a beautiful apartment, and there could be worse to come. If convicted, Holmes could spend 20 years in prison—and we’re guessing the views there will not be so great.

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