Blood-testing firm Theranos Inc. laid off most of its remaining workforce in a last-ditch effort to preserve cash and avert bankruptcy for a few more months, the Wall Street Journal reported. Yesterday’s layoffs take the company’s head count from about 125 employees to two dozen or fewer. As recently as late 2015, Theranos had about 800 employees. Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley firm’s founder and chief executive officer, announced the layoffs at an all-employee meeting at Theranos’s offices in Newark, Calif., less than a month after settling civil fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Under the SEC settlement, she was forced to relinquish her voting control over the company she founded 15 years ago as a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, give back a big chunk of her stock and pay a $500,000 penalty. She also agreed to be barred from serving as an officer or director in a public company for 10 years.
