Genetic testing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy after its board rejected a bid from its CEO to take it private. Four years ago the genetic testing company was valued at $3.5 billion. Now it’ll be lucky if someone pays $50 million for it. If you haven’t done it yet, there’s never been a better time to delete your 23andMe data.
The company filed for bankruptcy on Sunday after weeks of a collapsing stock price and multiple unsuccessful bids to buy the company and take it private from co-founder and former CEO Anne Wojcicki. Its board did not want Wojcick and found her bids wanting. Reuters said her last pitch was 41 cents a share to take the company private, which would have valued the company at just $11 million. She resigned as CEO after this bid failed.
In 2021, Forbes declared Wojcicki America’s newest “self made billionaire” after she cut a deal with Richard Branson to launch the 23andMe IPO. Now she’s posting through the collapse of her company on X.com and trying to find a way back into the business she started. “I have resigned as CEO of the company so I can be in the best position to pursue the company as an independent bidder,” she said in a long post on X.
“What made so many of our innovations possible were the 85% of our customers who opted in to research. Thanks to them they have empowered an incredible platform for discovery,” Wojcicki said. “23andMe was not a good steward of that data,” Wojcicki said in her post.
Which is true. Under Wojcicki’s tenure, 23andMe were bad stewards of people’s data. The company launched in 2006 and became a sensation after Oprah added one of its genetic testing kits to her list of “favorite things.” The pitch was simple: 23andMe would take a swab of your data and tell you about your genetics, including your propensity towards certain diseases and possible ancestors. 23andMe’s fortunes soured in 2023 after a hacker breached its servers and exposed the genetic data of 6.9 million customers.
The company didn’t handle it well. First it said that only 14,000 people had been exposed before it copped to the much larger number. Then it changed its terms of service on the sly in an attempt to dump angry customers into a mass arbitration process. In the end it agreed to pay a $30 million settlement and foot the bill for credit monitoring of the millions of people it exposed.
“Our foundation was the trust and respect of our customers, and they were always the guiding light on how we made decisions,” Wojcicki said in her post on X Monday morning. The data breach eroded that trust. The foundation was ruined. Throughout 2023 and 2024, 23andMe’s stock price tumbled and at the end of 2024 it laid off 200 employees. The layoffs deepened concerns that it could keep people’s genetic information safe and that it had a path of making money at all.
One of Wojcicki’s proposed solutions to turning the company around was bullying users into allowing their genetic data to be used for scientific research. “We now have the ability to mine the dataset for ourselves, as well as to partner with other groups,” the former CEO told Wired in 2024. It was a profound misreading of the moment.
“We have had many successes but I equally take accountability for the challenges we have today,” Wojcicki said on X after she resigned. “There is no doubt that the challenges faced by 23andMe through an evolving business model have been real, but my belief in the company and its future is unwavering. Consumers are rising up and asking for more control over their health and want greater knowledge about how to be healthy and why they may have health issues.”
She’s right, consumers are rising up and taking control over their health. One of the ways they’re doing it is by kicking gimmick genetic testing services like 23andMe out of their life. The truth is there’s not much the service can tell you. A complete genetic panel requires an in-depth screening of your entire family. Thanksgiving is hard enough without trying to get your uncle to spit into a tube.
After 23andMe and similar services hit the market, a lot of people got the tests done so they could learn more about their ethnic backgrounds. Americans wanted to know if the stories about being one-sixth Cherokee were true and they had found a test that could tell them. But once the test had been paid for, what else did 23andMe have?
It attempted to sell a subscription service that cost $1,188 a year. A cheaper version of the plan cost $298 up front and just $69 a year. But consumers weren’t buying and the data breach moved some of them to delete their account and reconsider what personal data they gave to the company.
With Wojcicki out, CFO Joe Selsavage is taking over to see the company through its bankruptcy. It got $35 in financing to help it through the process and listed its assets and liabilities between $100 to $500 million. It’s impossible to know what will happen to the data of the millions of people who swabbed a cheek and sent in a sample. So, again, it’s time to delete your data.
“If I am fortunate enough to secure the company’s assets through the restructuring process, I remain committed to our long-term vision of being a global leader in genetics and establishing genetics as a fundamental part of healthcare ecosystems worldwide,” Wojcicki said on X, perhaps misreading the moment once again.
