The fate of hard-nosed technology executive Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani is now in the hands of a jury that will weigh criminal charges alleging he joined disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, his former partner, in an elaborate fraud that jarred Silicon Valley.
Jury members finally get their chance to pore over the evidence submitted during a three-month trial after federal prosecutors on Friday finished a rebuttal to more than 11 hours of closing arguments methodically laid out by a lawyer defending Balwani. A separate jury spent seven days deliberating before convicting Holmes on four counts of investor fraud and conspiracy earlier this year.
Balwani, 57, began dating Holmes, now 38, around the same time she dropped out of Stanford University in 2003 to found her startup. He helped Holmes behind the scenes until 2010 when he became Theranos’ chief operating officer while he was living with Holmes. The couple broke up in 2016 as Theranos began to collapse amid revelations about serious problems with Theranos’ technology that they had concealed from investors and patients.