It has been roughly eight years since Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley founder known for her black turtleneck and the blood-testing startup Theranos, went from billion-dollar wunderkind to one of the era's most talked-about fraud cases. She is back in the cultural conversation again, this time as the subject of filmmaker Nathan Fielder's new documentary, You Can See Everything, now playing in theaters.
A story Hollywood keeps returning to
Holmes has already had the dramatized treatment once, with Amanda Seyfried playing her in Hulu's The Dropout in 2021. Fielder's film takes a different approach, following cameras into Holmes's home during the 34 days before she reported to prison. Its own logline describes the project as starting like an intimate character study before turning into something closer to a years-long descent.
How Theranos actually fell apart
Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 and built Theranos into a company valued at $9 billion by 2014, backed by names like George Shultz, Rupert Murdoch, and the Walton family. The problem, which surfaced publicly around 2016, was that the company's blood-testing technology did not actually work the way Holmes had claimed. By 2018 Theranos had effectively collapsed, and both Holmes and her former business partner and ex-boyfriend, Ramesh Balwani, were charged with multiple counts of wire fraud and conspiracy.
A jury convicted Holmes in January 2022 on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy, while clearing her on four other charges and deadlocking on three more. She was sentenced that November to 11 years in federal prison, less than the 15 years prosecutors had sought, along with an order to pay $452 million in restitution.