Erika Cheung exposed Elizabeth Holmes and moved to Hong Kong: meet the whistle-blower from The Dropout who helped bring down the Steve Jobs wannabe and now champions entrepreneurial ethics

Aug 4 , 2022

Erika Cheung moved to Hong Kong and started a new life after the Theranos scandal. Photo: SCMP Archive

Erika Cheung didn’t have to spend long at Theranos to discover the company’s many flaws – now former execs Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani are awaiting sentencing

Despite getting funding from billionaires Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison, Theranos wasn’t being honest with its investors, and now Cheung champions start-up ethics

In 2014, Elizabeth Holmes was valued at US$4.5 billion. This year, Forbes revised that number down to zero. The woman who was once touted as the “next Steve Jobs” embodied a persona the world was desperate to get behind: a young, confident female entrepreneur doing revolutionary work in male-dominated Silicon Valley.

But it all fell apart when it became clear that Holmes’ blood-testing start-up had been deceiving everyone. She was caught and charged for conning her investors with blatantly false promises. However, Holmes wasn’t charged with defrauding patients.

Elizabeth Holmes was able to fool many people with her start-up, Theranos. Photo: @itspoplolita/Instagram

The now-defunct healthcare company was founded in 2003 and valued at almost US$10 billion at its peak, with over US$700 million worth of investment from billionaires including Rupert Murdoch and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

Holmes claimed that, with just a prick of a finger and a few drops of blood, her company’s technology could run hundreds of blood tests to determine illnesses in patients.

Erika Cheung was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed graduate when she joined Theranos – but the much-hyped company didn’t fool her. Photo: @erikamcheung/Twitter

Investors and the world at large believed the Stanford drop-out for years. It wasn’t until two brave former employees, Erika Cheung and Tyler Schultz, exposed the truth to John Carreyrou at The Wall Street Journal that the truth began to come out. Hulu’s The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried and Jared Leto chronicled the downfall of the fraudster too.

Elizabeth Holmes, founder of blood testing company Theranos, on the first day of her fraud trial in 2021. Photo: AFP

So what do we know about the now-30-year-old whistle-blower Erika Cheung, who lived and worked in Hong Kong until recently?

Erika Cheung exposed Elizabeth Holmes and moved to Hong Kong: meet the whistle-blower from The Dropout who helped bring down the Steve Jobs wannabe and now champions entrepreneurial ethics

She was home-schooled and loves science