Elizabeth Holmes warns everyone to 'delete everything' urgently in dystopian message from prison

Some remain fascinated by the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, a woman who Forbes once named as the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the USA, but ended up on Fortune's list of "The World's 19 Most Disappointing Leaders".

Holmes was the founder of Theranos, a health technology company that claimed it had revolutionized the blood testing industry with a simple finger prick.

These impressive credentials turned out to be false, and after the SEC decreed that Holmes and former Theranos president Ramesh Balwani had defrauded investors and customers alike, a federal grand jury indicted the pair on nine counts of wire fraud and two of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Holmes is in the midst of serving a 135-month prison sentence for four counts, although a March 2026 update reduced it to just over 10 years. This means Elizabeth Holmes should be released in December 2031, with a $452 million restitution order.

We imagine the world will be a very different place in 2031, but looking ahead to a time she's free from Texas' Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, she's issued a warning.

Taking to X, Holmes foreshadowed problems with Anthropic's announcement of Project Glasswing. The AI giant reiterates that Glasswing is supposed to be an "urgent initiative to help secure the world’s most critical software."

With this, there come some serious privacy concerns, especially in the aftermath of an Amazon Web Services outage that took some of the world's most popular apps offline.

Resharing someone else's post warning that we're not prepared for what this means, Holmes added: "Delete your search history, delete your bookmarks, delete your reddit, medical records, 12 yr old tumblr, delete everything. Every photo on the cloud, every message on every platform."

Saying that nothing will be safe and everything will become public in the next year, Holmes continued: "Local storage and compute 📈."

Holmes went on to say that the idea is to download and locally store your data while training your own models to learn about you. Reminding users not to give away their identity for free by it being sold to the highest bidder over 'better advertisements', she went even further by suggesting artificial general intelligence is here.

Holmes' solemn advice ended with her saying: "There are risks we don't yet understand. Be diligent. Live a life assuming everything will come to light."

While critics suggest that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to worry about, there are obvious fears about mentions of medical records.

Replying to her post, one person wrote: "Good reminder to clean up your digital footprint, but no need to hit the panic button just be smart about what you store."

Another added: "Look, I don't disagree, but for different reasons. I've always said that I live my life as though everything I have ever done can be leaked or go viral, and be okay with it. Fun fact: the coverup/retroactive shredding is where they get you. Take it from...Elizabeth Holmes."

A third chimed in saying: "You are an idiot if you think deleting any of that data now will make a difference...then again you are in prison…"

Elon Musk's Grok similarly suggested this was fearmongering as it concluded: "Your cloud stuff (Google, iCloud, etc.) won't magically ‘become public’. Encryption, access controls, and laws still hold.

“Breaches happen, inference attacks improve, but a total dump of everyone's history/photos/messages in 12 months? No evidence for that scale. Minimize your footprint if you want, but this is fear > facts."