I went to see why Silicon Valley can't stop laughing at Elizabeth Holmes

• Tech companies and venture capital firms are hosting private screenings of the Elizabeth Holmes doc.
• I went to one hosted by the AI startup Extend.
• Attendees I talked to said they looked at Holmes more as a joke than a product of their industry.

Elizabeth Holmes is a black mark on Silicon Valley's reputation. And yet its residents are lining up for the documentary about her.

Tech companies across the US are hosting screenings of "You Can See Everything," the documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Holmes and her fiancé, Billy Evans. Venture capital funds are bringing their founders to the movie. There are Luma events upon Luma events.

The irony, of course, is that Holmes makes tech look bad. She sold big dreams with her medical testing company, Theranos, which eventually came crashing down. Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. (She has long said that she is innocent.)

Holmes is the exemplar of Silicon Valley's hucksterism. She's who much of America points to when they call founders liars or scammers.

So, what's with all the tech love? I went to a Thursday screening of the documentary hosted by Extend, an AI documentation startup, to find out.

Inside the Extend screening

A swarm of techies crowded outside theater nine at New York's AMC Lincoln Square.

The screening was set to start at 7. By 6:40, a crowd had formed to talk shop and admire Extend's custom stickers. Outside the theater door, I met Bo Lau, the event's organizer who works in developer relations for Extend.

Lau recently moved to New York and said she didn't want to watch the documentary alone. So, she posted about it on X — and it helped that she already had a following on so-called "Tech Twitter."

"I was like, 'What if I just turn this into a work event so I can expense it?'" Lau said.

The event got 1,400 RSVPs for about 120 seats, she said, and she's flying to San Francisco soon to host another screening. The tickets were given out free, so Extend got no benefit other than brand awareness, she said.

Why was it so popular? Lau said that Holmes was a source of fascination within Silicon Valley, and that Fielder's "awkward humor" matched the awkwardness of tech.

Filing into the theater, I heard my seatmates chat about AI and which tech companies let you work from home. On a brief social media scroll before my three-hour Do Not Disturb, I spotted Lau's recent project: a simulator of Holmes' desk.

Holmes' X account responded: "Impressive project."

Laugh lines, reflection time

This was my second time watching the documentary; the first was at New York Film Festival. The reactions among the techier crowd were mostly the same. There were lots of laughs, both at Fielder's discomfort and Holmes' oddities.

The crowd didn't react strongly to (mild spoiler alert) the big, AI version of Holmes that her fiancé creates after she goes to jail. That struck me as curious; maybe the tech crowd is already used to AI replicas.

There was also a much stronger gasp at the reveal of who's running Holmes' X account. That wasn't shocking; the attendees found out about this screening through X, after all.

We walked to a local wine bar, sipping cocktails while debriefing the film. Two techies that I talked to were split. One came away feeling bad for Holmes, then feeling bad that he felt bad for her. Another thought the film certified that Holmes was a true and utter psychopath.

I asked: Why is tech so comfortable laughing at Holmes? Her boastful visions don't sound too different from those of the current crop of young AI founders.

Maybe it was because the crowd was mostly in their 20s, not yet working in startups when Holmes' reckoning came.

Or Holmes has been detached from her Silicon Valley roots. The techies seemed to view her as more a product of the media — the books, the tabloid stories, the Hulu show — than of their own industry.

One attendee put it to me bluntly: she's turned into a meme.