Who Are Elizabeth Holmes' Parents? All About the Disgraced Theranos Founder's Dad Christian and Mom Noel

Elizabeth Holmes’ parents, Christian and Noel Anne Holmes, encouraged their daughter to achieve greatness — but she ended up making history for all the wrong reasons.

The Theranos founder may now be behind bars for a scheme that duped investors out of millions, but as a child, she aspired to change the world. Her father held roles in the field of humanitarian assistance and environmental protection, which inspired her career goals.

Speaking to Fortune in 2014, Christian explained that although his work meant that they had to move several times, Elizabeth was resilient and set her eyes on innovation. In response, Christian and Noel fostered that spark, supporting Elizabeth's different ambitions.

Related: Where Is Elizabeth Holmes Now? All About the Disgraced Tech Founder's Life in Prison

When she left for Stanford University, Christian handed his daughter a copy of Meditations, written by the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. “I wanted it to reinforce the message of a purposeful life,” he told the outlet before Elizabeth’s legal issues. “I think it really affected her.”

After getting charged with three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in 2022, Elizabeth was sentenced to over 11 years in federal prison. It has since been reduced to nine years for good behavior, with a release scheduled for 2032, and she has an idea of what she wants to do when she's free.

“This will be my life’s work,” she told PEOPLE about an American Freedom Act bill she drafted by hand, aimed at bolstering the presumption of innocence and improving the criminal procedure.

Here’s everything to know about Elizabeth Holmes’ parents, Christian and Noel Anne Holmes.

Christian is a descendant of the Fleischmann Yeast fortune

Elizabeth’s father, Christian, came from a prominent background. His great-grandfather, also named Christian Holmes, emigrated to the United States from Denmark as a young man. He settled in Cincinnati, where he studied engineering and eventually became a physician, per The New Yorker.

While working in a local hospital, Dr. Holmes met a patient named Charles Fleischmann, who had built a baking empire selling packaged yeast. Dr. Holmes went on to marry Charles’ daughter, Bettie Fleischmann, and the pair achieved success and wealth.

Unfortunately, by the time Elizabeth’s father was born, his relatives had depleted much of the family fortune, according to the 2018 nonfiction book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. But that didn’t stop Christian from sharing stories of his family’s entrepreneurial past.

“I grew up with those stories about greatness and about people deciding not to spend their lives on something purposeful, and what happens to them when they make that choice — the impact on character and quality of life,” Elizabeth told The New Yorker in 2014.

Christian was once an executive at Enron

Christian grew up in California and graduated from The Webb Schools. He went on to attend Wesleyan University, where he studied political science and government, per Bad Blood.

Early in his career, he served as a second lieutenant of civil affairs in the Army Reserves before getting involved in government work, according to his LinkedIn. In addition to holding different roles at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Christian worked for the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Several other career moves prompted the family to move, with Christian eventually landing a job at Enron, an electric and gas company valued at over $100 billion at the time. But while serving as a vice president in a division of the company, the business was exposed for accounting fraud, which eventually led them to file for bankruptcy.

Although the Holmes family briefly fell on hard times, per Bad Blood, Christian was later hired at Rice University and the World Wildlife Fund before returning to USAID for a few years. Christian now works at The Boston Consulting Group, where he focuses on the "performance of water and wastewater utilities."

Noel worked for the government before welcoming Elizabeth

Before becoming a mother to Elizabeth and her brother Christian, Noel worked for the government.

According to The New Yorker, she served as a foreign policy and defense aide on Capitol Hill, where she reportedly met her husband.

After they married and welcomed their children, Noel stepped away from her career to raise their family full-time.

Elizabeth grew up seeing her father’s humanitarian work

Growing up, Elizabeth observed her father’s career in humanitarian assistance and environmental protection. Though they moved around frequently, Elizabeth was inspired by Christian's efforts to make the world a better place.

“My father worked in disaster relief and so I grew up in a house that had pictures of all these little children in really tough parts of the world. I was absolutely convinced that was what I was going to do,” she told CNN in 2014.

She continued, “Then when I started realizing that a company could be a vehicle for having very direct impact over a change that you are trying to make, I started thinking about the concept of what could I build that could impact a lot of peoples’ lives?”

Christian’s career also motivated Elizabeth to learn Mandarin, which helped her gain early entrance to Stanford University, per The New Yorker.

In the 1980s, Christian’s job brought him to China for two weeks every month, and Elizabeth started studying Mandarin with her parents' encouragement. Fast forward to the summer after her sophomore year of high school, she convinced Stanford to allow her to take college-level language classes.

By the time she graduated high school, she had completed three years of Mandarin at Stanford and enrolled full-time at the university — where she eventually founded Theranos.

Christian and Noel supported Elizabeth dropping out of Stanford

Elizabeth spent just one year at Stanford before deciding to drop out to focus on founding her company.

According to Fortune, she spent the summer after her freshman year interning at the Genome Institute of Singapore, and when she returned home, she became determined to innovate the industry.

Before her sophomore year, she spent several days writing a patent application inspired by the ideas she had developed while in Singapore.

“I saw her sit down at the computer, and for five to six days she barely got up. I would bring her food occasionally, and she slept maybe one or two hours a night for five nights,” Noel told the outlet.

Although Christian hoped his daughter would achieve a PhD, he and Noel supported Elizabeth leaving school.

“What do you want for your children? You want them to do something they’re passionate about. To follow their dream. To help people. To change the world. So we said, ‘Of course. Go do this,’ ” Noel explained.

Christian and Noel were early supporters of Theranos

Although Christian and Noel didn’t fully understand the details of what their daughter wanted to accomplish with her blood-testing company, they allowed her to take the money they had saved for her college education and invest it into her business, per Fortune.

Elizabeth went on to use that money to fund the early days of Theranos as well as her family’s connections to find other investors for the company.

Christian and Noel were by their daughter’s side during her fraud trial

Over a decade after Elizabeth dropped out of Stanford, her healthcare startup Theranos had evolved into a billion-dollar company. With the promise of technology that could run hundreds of medical tests using only a few drops of blood, Elizabeth raised millions of dollars from investors.

But behind the scenes, everything was not as it seemed. By 2015, whistleblowers had brought attention to how the company was misleading patients and physicians about the efficacy of the company’s blood tests — an “elaborate years-long” fraud that duped investors out of millions.

In the spring of 2018, Elizabeth and her former company president, Sunny Balwani, were charged with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. A tenth wire fraud charge was filed against Holmes in 2020.

Elizabeth's parents were by her side when the case went to trial in 2021. On several occasions, Elizabeth walked into the courtroom hand-in-hand with her mother.

Christian and Noel were also nearby when Elizabeth was found guilty of four of the charges — and then officially sentenced to more than 11 years in prison in 2022. It has since been reduced down to nine years for good behavior.

They have visited Elizabeth in prison

While Christian and Noel have maintained a low profile since their daughter entered prison, they were spotted spending time together during a visitors’ day at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas in June 2023.

Elizabeth’s parents, as well as her husband, Billy Evans, were photographed at the facility, walking through the prison yard and talking at a picnic table.

Her parents have since visited on other occasions, including Elizabeth’s 40th birthday in 2024.

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