Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes is the world's youngest self-made female billionaire.
When she was a sophomore at Stanford in 2003, Holmes founded healthcare-technology company Theranos (a few months later, she dropped out to focus on the company). Today, she has a net worth of $4.6 billion.
Theranos is a $9 billion biotech company that has a new approach to blood testing. Its goal is to make clinical testing cheaper and faster.
Theranos wants to conduct blood tests for health issues through a single finger stick rather than by having to draw vials of blood in a doctor's office. Theranos has drawn skepticism from the scientific community in part because Theranos is cagey about how its tests actually work.
But for now, Holmes is on top of the world. Already, her blood tests are being offered in some drugstores like Walgreens.
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Elizabeth Holmes was born in February 1984. Her mom, Noel Anne, was a Congressional committee staffer, and her dad, Christian Holmes, worked for government agencies like USAID.
Holmes' family moved around a lot when she was young, from Washington, DC, to Houston, to China.
At the age of 9, Holmes wrote a letter to her father: "What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn't know was possible to do."
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