Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison today to begin serving an 11-year sentence after being found guilty of defrauding investors last year. Yahoo Finance legal reporter Alexis Keenan breaks down what prison life will likely look like for Holmes.

Video Transcript

- Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes, has reported to prison to start serving her 11-year sentence. Holmes, who was once a darling of Silicon Valley, with promises to revolutionize the blood testing industry, was found guilty in January of 2022 for defrauding investors.

Yahoo Finance's Alexis Keenan has been following this case from the very beginning. Alexis, what can we expect now that Holmes is in prison?

ALEXIS KEENAN: So Holmes is going to have to live with the reality that this is a federal prison. And these sentences are tough. She is serving 11 plus years behind bars. And yes, there's a possibility that she could gain some credits in a federal program for an early release, but look, these sentences are difficult to shave off time from what is handed down.

Now this Federal Women's prison, it is all-women. Holmes surrendered just a little bit over an hour ago. You can see some video of her there, walking with some prison escorts into the facility. And where it's located is just about 100 miles Northwest of her hometown in Houston. It's in Byron-- or Bryan-- excuse me-- Texas. And this is one of seven federal facilities like it in the country.

But Holmes will have to share a room with other inmates, probably three other inmates. She will have no access to the internet as we know it. She'll have some capability to use an intranet prison system that prisoners can use, but those are not in their rooms.

She'll also have to sweep and clean her floors, she will have to report to work. And in exchange for work, this is required in these facilities, Holmes and other inmates, they can earn as little as $0.12 per hour, and as much as $1.15 per hour.

She'll also, most importantly here, have to say goodbye, for now, to her two young children-- very young children. She can have visitation, only on the weekends, with family and friends, visitation with attorneys, and others who are involved in her appeal. She's also appealed her case to an appellate court.

They are able to meet with her at different times, but visitation is really limited as are phone calls, as are video calls. 15 minutes for phone calls, 25 minutes for video calls, and they cannot be made during working hours. And these are full days of work at these facilities.

Now just to go back for a minute, Holmes was ultimately sentenced by a jury in Silicon Valley for lying to investors in her company. She raised about $1,000,000,000 from some very high-profile folks. Also she ended up being convicted of four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy. Also, her former boyfriend and CEO, Sunny Balwani, he was also convicted in this same scheme. However, he was convicted on all 12 counts that were brought against him.

Holmes is appearing appealing her case. And so that will take some time to work its way through the appellate system. And we don't know, at all, at this point, whether she will have an opportunity to have any of her convictions overturned.

- So Alexis, how does this compare to other executives who've been convicted of corporate fraud?

ALEXIS KEENAN: Yeah, so take a look at a list here. This certainly isn't a comprehensive list but at the top there, the late Bernie Madoff, he was ultimately convicted for his Ponzi scheme that he was taking dollars from his investors. He was sentenced to 150 years in federal prison. Ultimately, he was said to have stolen about $20 billion from his hopeful investors, who entrusted him with their money.

Also the late Bernie Ebbers, WorldCom CEO. He was sentenced to 25 years for inflating the company's financials to the tune of about $11 billion. He drained the company of it's market cap, arguably, and that was about $180 billion before the company went bankrupt.

Also you have there, Jeff Skilling, Enron CEO. He was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison on 18 counts. He was convicted for hiding the company's financial losses. Also, he had an illegal gain to his personal net worth of $63 million in stock sales, and ultimately wiped out $70 billion in shareholder value there.

Now compare that to Elizabeth Holmes, who is sentenced to that 11 years for defrauding investors to the tune of about 144 million, with an M, dollars. And then her co-defendant, Sonny Balwani, sentenced to 13 years. And if you add up some of his convictions that have to do with investors, he was defrauding investors of approximately 155 million with an M.

So big differences there, but not necessarily huge differences in these long-term sentences for these defendants, Akiko.

- Yeah, a long road ahead for both of them there. Alexis Keenan, appreciate you following the story for us.