It was fitting that, just hours after the first public screenings of the Elizabeth Holmes documentary began last Thursday, Elon Musk put on a show of his own.
That night, in Texas, Musk unveiled the company’s new Roadster prototype, a car that would defy gravity. Tesla built what was roughly one-half of a roller-coaster loop, which the Roadster climbed before momentarily hanging upside down and then executing a controlled flip and gliding down to Earth. The demo worked. In another stunt, it did a barrel roll over a semi-truck. Each maneuver was powered by air thrusters that guided the car to a soft landing.
The demo was impressive. But watching the clips, I could feel my brain struggling to process what I was being shown. Was this real? The car did climb vertically, flip, and land. But Musk, who has built wildly successful companies, is also famously prone to outlandish claims that don’t always pan out. I couldn’t help but wonder what, if anything, Tesla’s demonstration or Musk had elided. “This will be an actual car that’s on the roads,” Musk said. He got the flying-car headlines he wanted, but will this car actually be released? There are already reasons to doubt it: The car displayed on Thursday won’t be in production until at least 2028, and it features 10 thrusters powered by 600 liters of compressed air. The flying version of the Roadster will be sold “invite-only.” Its price tag is likely to be astronomical. And so Musk isn’t exactly lying here. Rather, he’s making bold proclamations and asking people to take his pledge to deliver as an article of faith.
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Less than 48 hours later, I found myself sitting in a crowded theater, watching the new documentary You Can See Everything, about the disgraced and convicted founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, and her husband, Billy Evans. In one scene, Holmes and Evans are hurriedly trying to court investors and research talent to build out what they refer to as Theranos 2.0. This scene is arguably the only time in the film where the duo don’t appear to be filled with existential dread. During phone calls and Zoom meetings, they spit out jargon and look earnestly excited about what they can build if they “get the band back together.” At the end of the sequence, Holmes is asked about why she’s spending her last days with her family building a company, and she responds that this is what she’s meant to be doing here on Earth. It is one of the few moments where I confidently believe her. Whatever she earnestly believes about her own guilt, it seems clear that her identity is inextricably tied to her notion that she is, in Silicon Valley parlance, a builder: a high-agency, visionary type with a remarkable risk tolerance who makes things and isn’t afraid to fail, because she has a monomaniacal obsession with pushing the bounds of what’s possible.
The film, which had the biggest opening for a documentary in more than 20 years, is extremely well suited to a post-truth era. The co-directors, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, bury the audience with unreliable narration such that, when you get to the end, you feel like a participant in the film. It also left me exhilarated, slightly repulsed, and feeling as if I was going insane. In that way, the documentary replicates what it’s like to navigate the informational hall of mirrors we all inhabit. But what I found most bracing about the film—more so than the supposed unknowability of anyone or anything—is how Holmes’s act and affect do not feel like an aberration in 2026. In fact, her behavior embodies the current ethos of Silicon Valley.
When she built Theranos, Holmes was a college dropout with boundless ambitions who styled herself after Steve Jobs. Jobs famously said things such as “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” and Holmes, like Jobs, projected the aura of a person ready to pull the future into the present by any means necessary. Jobs routinely delivered on these promises, and kept many projects secret until they were ready for the masses. Holmes did the opposite, offering a fantastical version of a product that did not exist, obscuring the actual capabilities and lying about the financials. She wasn’t alone; over time, the idea of the builder became more synonymous with a founder’s ideas, charisma, and salesmanship than with the products themselves. “I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences,” Nikita Bier, a tech entrepreneur who was recently Elon Musk’s head of product at X, wrote on the platform this weekend in response to the documentary. “They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as ‘faking it ‘til you make it.’”
Holmes’s high-profile failure and the collapse of Theranos in 2018 didn’t kill the builder archetype. If anything, the very structure of Silicon Valley became more deeply intertwined with the builder mindset. Fake it ’til you make it (provided it isn’t outright fraud) is a necessary outcome of an industry that’s funded by venture capitalists, who often make strategic bets on projects so early in development that the products are still hypothetical. And so VCs threw unfathomable money at promising but half-baked ideas in the hopes of fabulous payouts. Failures were overlooked, even celebrated as necessary or teachable moments—honorable proof of being a “man in the arena.” In 2022, after Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire was revealed to be an elaborate Ponzi scheme, the writer John Ganz argued that, in an industry built on big bets, the line between frauds and visionaries becomes difficult to suss out until everything implodes. “This is the Fyre Festival era of capitalism: outlandish promises and then a ludicrous debacle.”
Much of that rush to invest has been driven by a culture progressively gripped by the fear of missing out on the next industry-shaking payout. Untold billions were poured into crypto, then NFTs, Web3, and the ill-fated metaverse. In crypto, rug-pulling scams and Ponzi schemes abounded; its boosters said things such as “Have fun staying poor.” Today we’re living through what many suggest could be an AI bubble, and the same mentality persists. Have fun staying poor has been replaced with the idea of a “permanent underclass” of people who failed to get in early and now stand to lose their economic viability, and potentially their human agency altogether. Like Theranos, crypto, and NFTs, the AI industry is defined by claims of its inevitability and its future power (to be certain, chatbots and coding agents are real and powerful in ways the other technologies were not). In this way, AI is a faith-based technology; one’s desire to work on it, bet the success of the global economy on it, love it, or fear its End Times powers is typically predicated on what one can imagine it might become.
The past eight years have warped the tech industry to the point that it can feel untethered from the constraints of reality. You can see it in headlines everywhere if you’re looking. On Saturday, an Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark, suggested that the U.S. GDP could jump in the next four years from about $30 trillion to $44 trillion thanks to rapid AI-driven progress in many industries. This would be one of the largest periods of growth in U.S. history, a prediction based on nothing more than the most “extreme parameter setting” of an Anthropic economic model the company released this fall. You can see it in the IPO prospectuses for a company like SpaceX, which includes in its ambitions the goal to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars” and initiatives such as asteroid mining and space tourism. And earlier this month, Musk noted that “this will sound super crazy, but I see a path to SpaceX being worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy.” You could call all these claims tech optimism or, as the famed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote in his 2023 manifesto, necessary for the “glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” You could also call it speculative fiction.
About halfway through the film, Holmes heads to prison and the documentary shifts to focus on Billy Evans, the man with whom Holmes has two children. With Holmes in prison, Evans has become her unreliable narrator. He is, as others have noted, also a helpful lens to understand the transformation of Silicon Valley. Evans has seemingly embraced Musk and Andreessen’s brand of vice signaling. We see him shooting guns, extolling Charlie Kirk, and lashing out at people on X under the cloak of anonymity (posting as Holmes, using her X account). He makes grandiose claims about his new company but seems embittered and incapable of submitting to hard questions about it. The veneer of excitement that the couple project in the Theranos 2.0 montage is replaced by a paranoia and resentment that people, including possibly Fielder, might be trying to take him down.
It all made me wonder how Silicon Valley might respond to Theranos’s collapse if it were happening today. Reactionary types in the industry might rally around Holmes, insisting that she was too early or needed more time. They might attack the press more forcefully for trying to bring her down (Holmes and Theranos did try to retaliate against whistleblowers and the reporter who broke the story). Trust in traditional media is even lower now than it was back then, and Silicon Valley has a robust ecosystem of very popular, industry-friendly podcasts and creators who could champion Holmes’s narrative. Evans, for instance, appeared last week on the popular All-In podcast. X is now owned by Musk. The truth takes longer to come out; in some cases, it might feel almost irrelevant. The universal outrage that Theranos sparked in 2015, when news first emerged that something was deeply wrong, sounds quaint now.
“When people ask how she got so far, it’s largely explained by the period she did it in,” Bier wrote in his X post about Holmes. “And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up.” I agree with the first part of Bier’s statement and take issue with the second. The brand of delusion that defined Holmes and the twisted epistemological game that You Can See Everything showcases is still deeply embedded in the industry. None of this is to suggest that everyone in Silicon Valley is engaged in rampant, Theranos-like provable fraud. But today’s entrepreneurs are emboldened to make even more outlandish claims about the future, and it’s more difficult than ever to parse what is real, what is knowingly fake, and what is being offered in good or bad faith.
In response to Bier’s post, Jason Calacanis, an investor and a co-host of All-In, noted that there was “much truth” to Bier’s explanation before he offered a rebuttal befitting a true builder—AI will soon solve the Theranos problem: “In the next ten years, a blood testing product will emerge that will make folks go, ‘See, @ElizabethHolmes was just 20 years too early!’”
The builder is never wrong. If anything, they are just early. The future is coming. Just have faith.