Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder serving an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors, recently did something out of the norm for people in federal custody: She updated her bio on X, adding the phrase, “Mostly my words, posted by others.”
Later on Aug. 26, she sent her first tweet in almost a decade: an image of Martin Luther King Jr (opens in new tab). alongside his quote “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Holmes’ account was just warming up. The next day, it became a classic reply guy, focused largely on Bryan Johnson, the longevity entrepreneur known for his Blueprint diet and “Don’t die” mantra. At 9:50 a.m. on Wednesday, Holmes’ handle replied “Amen (opens in new tab)” to a tweet (opens in new tab) by Johnson from 18 minutes earlier declaring, “Defeating death would be humanity’s greatest accomplishment.”
When Johnson tweeted later that morning about his eccentricity (opens in new tab), Holmes jumped into the replies again to offer him reassurance. “First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, then you change the world,” she tweeted five minutes after he posted. Johnson did not respond.
By Saturday, Holmes’ account was tweeting like a budding Blueprint-er: “I am deep in research on inflammation and regeneration. … Currently fasting between 2pm and 6am,” she posted (opens in new tab).
Has she drunk the longevity Kool-Aid during her 28 months at Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a minimum security prison in Texas where she serves alongside Jeffrey Epstein madame Ghislaine Maxwell and former “Real Housewives” star Jen Shah? Unclear. But the more pressing question is, how is she tweeting from prison at all? And are these tweets real?
The Federal Bureau of Prisons and Federal Prison Camp Bryan did not respond to requests for comment. Holmes’ X account did not respond to direct messages.
Since 2022, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has allowed incarcerated people to purchase electronic tablets for educational, entertainment, and messaging purposes. At FCP Bryan, prisoners can buy the Keefe Score 7 tablet from the commissary for $131.30, according to the prison’s price sheet. (opens in new tab) They come preloaded with music, movies, and educational training modules but have no internet access. Though Keefe promotes the tablets as having messaging options, a 2024 Wired i (opens in new tab)nvestigation found that the messaging functions are disabled in prison, meaning they can’t be used to email or text. (JailExchange, a database of information for families of inmates, suggests (opens in new tab) that messaging has since been enabled.)
According to the FCP Bryan handbook (opens in new tab) from 2023, what Holmes does have are monitored phone calls, video calls, and email access via CorrLinks, the secure prison messaging system. The company said it could not “provide that information” when asked about Holmes’ email usage.
But she would not have access to the internet or to social media apps like X. However, that does not mean that her recent tweets are fake. The account has been associated with Holmes since at least 2015 (her former handle was @eholmes2003). A quick scroll through it reveals tweets from her rise to fame, many about Theranos (opens in new tab) and how “humbled (opens in new tab)” she was to be honored as Glamour magazine’s 2015 woman of the year — all seeming to indicate this is her real account. Her fiancé and self-described “babydaddy,” Billy Evans, links to it (opens in new tab) in his X profile.
The most likely scenario, and the one hinted at in her updated X bio, is that she is dictating her posts to someone outside the prison, similar to how Chelsea Manning (opens in new tab), Ross Ulbricht (opens in new tab), and Joe Exotic (opens in new tab) maintained their online presence during their respective imprisonments. If she was using a contraband phone, the risk would be high; when convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli (opens in new tab) was caught with one in 2019, he was sent into solitary confinement.
Holmes’ return to X comes on the heels of high-profile moves by people in her orbit. In May, (opens in new tab) Evans announced Haemanthus, a new blood diagnostic startup with an eerie similarity to Theranos. “This is not Theranos 2.0” the company tweeted. (opens in new tab) Also in May, pro-Holmes billboards appeared in Los Angeles, New York, and Florida claiming she is innocent. (opens in new tab) However, Holmes’ account quickly rebutted rumors that it had anything to do with the ads, writing, “not our billboards.” (opens in new tab)
The timing of her tweets is intriguing, since in many cases she is replying to posts within a few minutes, which would seem to suggest that someone is reading X to her over the phone, rather than sending tweets over email for her to see and respond to. Or perhaps she isn’t reading them at all, and someone else is impersonating her.
FCP Bryan’s manual notes that telephone access is 6 a.m. to 11:30 p.m (opens in new tab). Holmes’ earliest tweet this week was sent at 6:03 a.m. (opens in new tab)