On Theranos & Holmes, We Can See Everything — the Fraud Is Still Clear

The failure of Theranos has been repeatedly held up as a corporate governance lesson in what not to do in the years since the company’s 2018 implosion and federal criminal trials of its two highest-ranking officers.

Those hoping that the Nathan Fielder co-directed documentary “You Can See Everything” would put Theranos or its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, now a resident at a federal prison in Bryan, Texas, in a different context, one in which she or the company appear less fraudulent, should not hold their breath.

Over the course of the nearly three-hour documentary, Holmes and her now-partner (business and romantic), Billy Evans, try to paint Holmes as a literal thinker. She doesn’t get the joke of the Abbott & Costello “Who’s on First” routine. She can’t properly scramble eggs. She and Fielder volley back and forth about the meaning of the word “can.” Holmes and Evans repeat claims that she was misquoted in The New York Times by a single word that changes the whole meaning of a passage.

While nobody uses the word “neurodivergent,” that seems to be what they are driving at. Her brain works differently, multiple people tell Fielder, himself the subject of speculation about autism. And if Elizabeth Holmes is neurodivergent, does that put her statements in a different context? After all, if she and her investors had different definitions of “can,” did she knowingly deceive them? 

Holmes, now going by the nickname Liz, is a sympathetic character in this film beyond the open and probably unanswerable question about her neurotype. “You Can See Everything” starts as she is just over a month away from beginning the federal prison sentence. Holmes is the mother of two young children, including a breastfeeding newborn. Holmes’s father tells Fielder things in his daughter’s life began to change when she was raped, though the topic is not further explored because Evans forces the conversation to a close.

Evans, 34, the scion of a San Diego hotel company, is the villain of this movie. He’s controlling (the egg-scrambling scene draws both laughs and groans) and becomes increasingly hostile as the movie progresses, declaring at one point that he carries a gun at all times and at another point vowing retribution against those who have wronged himself and Holmes.

While Holmes, now 42, is in prison, Evans has taken over her X account, posting crazy things in her name, and has been given power of attorney, literally putting himself in a position to control what happens to her. Evans has drawn understandable comparisons to Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Holmes’s former business and romantic partner and co-defendant in her fraud trial whom Holmes says was controlling and abusive. 

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For his part, Fielder, himself an enigmatic cultural figure, seems taken in by Elizabeth Holmes. He seems very much to want to believe her or at the very least understand her. He manages to clarify what she means when she says the machine can do blood tests, which seems to boil down to it being able to download a testing protocol. 

“You Can See Everything” offers few clear answers, but try as he might to do anything to the contrary, Fielder has given Holmes at least some of what she and Evans presumably wanted by opening their lives to the cult auteur — to sow doubt about her culpability in the Theranos matter and, perhaps, rehabilitate the public’s assessment of her trustworthiness. 

But she’s already been convicted, why would her trustworthiness matter now? Money.

In addition to being a convicted felon with an expected release date of Feb. 22, 2030, Holmes is still an entrepreneur. Before she leaves for prison, we see Holmes and Evans talking on the phone to potential investors in their new startup, which today formally is Evans’s startup — only he is on the filing documents in the state of Texas. Gobsmackingly, the new company has virtually the same mission of Theranos — to disrupt the health diagnostic space, only this time, it’s got something to do with lasers. Fielder’s film shows Evans speed-running through science videos on YouTube, and neither Evans nor Holmes have specialized training or degrees in science. Holmes famously dropped out of Stanford.

Holmes seemingly has learned no lessons from the Theranos debacle, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world hasn’t. Giving the film its title, she tells Fielder, imploring him to trust her, “You can see everything.” 

Yes, that’s right; we all can.

We can see in her trial testimony that she acknowledged personally adding Pfizer’s logo to a report written for Walgreen’s executives, presumably to suggest the pharma giant endorsed the report’s findings. We can see in text messages that she brushed off warnings from Balwani about not over-exposing herself in the media given how shoddy the company’s tech actually was. Jurors heard multiple recordings of Holmes saying the company’s technology was actively being used by the US military “in the battlefield” when that had never happened. We know that she massively overstated the size of the company’s revenue, claiming it had earned about $200 million from military and pharmaceutical contracts when the real number was less than 5% of that. And there is so much more.

None of that requires a neurotypical mind or one that does not think literally to understand as plain fraud, but Holmes needs the public and potential investors in Evans’s new venture to see something else, which is everything she appears to be now: a new mother, trading her trademark black turtleneck and suit jacket for trad-wife neutral tones and modest gold cross, just wanting to be understood. 

We should not fall for it — this time.