When she was 26, Marie Holmes won the US Powerball lottery. Her life changed completely.
She was a single mom with a high school education in a small town, but now she has $188 million to her name. She’s a lucky girl and I hope she uses that money wisely.
Theranos
Theranos was a company that Holmes founded in 2003 to revolutionize blood testing. It aimed to offer tests that could be performed with just a fingerprick and purported to have the ability to detect conditions such as cancer and high cholesterol.
Holmes dropped out of Stanford to pursue her business and spent the first decade of Theranos operating in stealth mode. She enlisted the help of investors like Oracle founder Larry Ellison and VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which invested more than $700 million in the startup.
However, Theranos’s testing accuracy was questioned by medical authorities, investors and the media. Theranos also faced numerous lawsuits, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began investigating it.
Holmes was found guilty of four counts of fraud and deceiving investors in January 2022 and faces up to 20 years in prison. She also faces millions in fines and restitution.
Vanity Fair
Marie Holmes is a single mom who won the Powerball lottery in 2015, making her one of the world’s richest women. She’s now worth an estimated $80 million.
She’s also a philanthropist who uses her fortune to help families in need. Her foundation gives away toys and school supplies, and it supports local families with their basic needs.
But she hasn’t been without a few setbacks, too. In 2014, her fiance, Lamarr McDow, was arrested for heroin trafficking.
He was released on bond just a few weeks after Holmes won the Powerball lottery, but he was arrested again for violating pre-trial release rules by having drugs and a gun on him. Despite that, Holmes paid an additional $12 million bail for McDow on New Year’s Day.
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Forbes
Before winning the lottery, Marie Holmes was a single mother who worked two jobs to support her family. She also cared for one of her children who have cerebral palsy.
After she won, she immediately made a charitable contribution to Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church. It was the largest amount that a lottery winner has ever donated to a church.
However, she soon faced betrayal by those who she trusted most. Her boyfriend, Lamarr McDow, has been arrested three times since she won and has been accused of being a drug dealer and criminal.
The Daily Mail reports that Holmes has spent $21 million to bail her fiance out of jail, and that’s only a small percentage of her winnings.
Her fiancee, McDow, has been arrested for drug trafficking and was caught again in July of 2015, so she had to pay another $6 million to bail him out. He now faces charges of violating his release, so she’s losing out on a huge chunk of her winnings.
Glamour
Marie Holmes is a single mother of four children who struggled to provide for her family before she won the Powerball lottery. She used some of her winnings to help her kids and give back to the community.
Holmes started a foundation that gives away toys and school supplies. She also donated money to her church.
She even purchased a home in Seattle for her kids to live in.
But Holmes quickly started spending her winnings too fast. She bailed her boyfriend out of jail three times and paid more than $600,000 to bail bondsmen.
In season six episode seven of Fix My Life, Holmes revealed that she bought her children a home in Seattle.
The couple also got into a tiff with their neighbors because Holmes was moving her family into an affluent neighborhood after years of struggling to make ends meet. According to McDow, their neighbors were mostly white and they began harassing them because of the racial prejudice in the area.