Elizabeth Holmes, the entrepreneur turned fraudster, remains a subject of fascination with the release of a new documentary, You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. The film, released in the US on Friday, was shot in the 34 days before Holmes reported to federal prison camp Bryan in Texas to begin her 11-year sentence for wire fraud and conspiracy.
First Encounters and a Distinctive Persona
David Agus, a medical oncologist, first met Holmes at a health conference and was struck by the difference between her off-stage and on-stage personas. "The accent changed: this deep voice, very serious," Agus recalls. "It was as if I had met a person and then interviewed a separate person. That transition from the green room to the stage – I had never experienced something like that before."
Holmes founded Theranos as a teenager, touting technology that could perform medical tests using only a few drops of blood. She cultivated a persona with blond hair, an unblinking gaze, a husky voice, and a black turtleneck in homage to Steve Jobs. She mesmerised investors including Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, Carlos Slim, and former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, becoming America's youngest self-made female billionaire before her career ended in disgrace.
The Illusion and Its Impact
Margaret O'Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington and author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, says, "You can't make this stuff up. If some screenwriter had tried to manufacture this out of whole cloth people would be like, no, this is an unbelievable story. Yet it's real. Who's the real Elizabeth Holmes? That's a question that still hasn't been answered."
Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 to establish Theranos, promising to revolutionise blood testing. She ran the company with Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, keeping their romantic relationship secret, and together they raised $945m. By 2014, Theranos was valued at $9bn, and Holmes was named the youngest female self-made billionaire with a net worth of $4.5bn by age 30.
Doubts and Downfall
Scientists had doubts about Holmes's promises. Agus recalls, "The problem with blood is it clots and, when you do these small fluidics, it clogs. She wouldn't give me an answer of why that wasn't a problem for her. To me, that was the initial red flag." John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford, published a commentary in 2015 highlighting the absence of peer-reviewed evidence for Theranos's claims, noting that patents cited were "mostly nonsensical."
Holmes quit as chief executive in 2018, and the company collapsed that year. She was sentenced in 2022 to more than 11 years in prison. The documentary offers an intimate glimpse into her domestic life with partner Billy Evans and their two children, showing her reading bedtime stories for up to 12 hours a day. Off-camera, the biggest revelation is that Holmes and Evans were planning a new medical tech startup; in 2025, Evans sought $18.5m for Haemanthus, a company allegedly holding patents for a device scanning blood, urine, and saliva using lasers.
O'Mara sees the Theranos story as a broader cautionary tale for Silicon Valley, noting, "The founder culture and obsession of Silicon Valley that helped Elizabeth Holmes become who she was is still alive and well and stronger than ever. We've never seen power and wealth more concentrated in so few hands."
