Elizabeth Holmes (b.1984)

She is a great-great-granddaughter of the philanthropic Mrs Bettie Fleischmann Holmes (1873-1941) who built The Chimneys at Sands Point on Long Island. In 2003, she founded and became the CEO of Theranos, a health technology company that claimed to have revolutionized blood testing. Drawing on the validations of several of her influential personal contacts, by 2015 her company was valued at $9-billion and Forbes then hailed Holmes as the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in American history. But, her world came crashing down in spectacular style just one year later as rumors of fraud began to circulate around the company's claims and in 2016 Forbes revised its estimate of her net worth to zero. She and her business partner (and former lover) Sunny Balwani were convicted on nine counts of wire fraud in 2018 and in 2022 she was sentenced to more than 11-years in prison.