This essay contains spoilers for “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder’s new film about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
“You Can See Everything” is a hilarious, thrilling, fascinating, beautiful piece of art. What it certainly is not is a documentary, and it’s dangerous to pretend that it is.
I’ve had the displeasure of watching disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes at work not just over a three-hour film, but over the entirety of my adult life. I was an employee turned whistleblower at Theranos, my grandfather sat on her board, she came to my family holidays and birthday parties. I met her when I was 20, she went to prison when I was 32. I wish I could have told director Nathan Fielder what I told John Carreyrou when he started investigating her: Do not underestimate Elizabeth Holmes.
A documentary is a form of journalism meant to discover and reveal the truth. “You Can See Everything,” which follows Elizabeth soon before she heads to prison for fraud, is a piece of art with the intent of creating ambiguity. A more accurate name would be “You Can See Everything That We Chose To Point The Camera At.” Broadening the scope just a little bit would have revealed an easily knowable but far less intriguing truth.
The film attempts to answer the central question “Did/does Elizabeth lie?” But it doesn’t look far beyond the walls of the small condo she and her husband, Billy, were renting in San Diego.
Fielder intentionally stays away from relitigating the Theranos scandal, but does so just enough to introduce doubt in the minds of the audience about whether Elizabeth actually lied about the capabilities of the Theranos technology. In the first half of the film, she digs up the Theranos blood testing device, exploded into its many components, lays them all out the kitchen table, and tells Fielder that this was the Theranos device that could run any test … if they had developed the chemistries for those tests.
Fielder and Elizabeth then semantically examine the word “could.” He tries to decipher if Elizabeth truly can’t understand how her interpretation of “we can run hundreds of tests from a single drop of blood” was so different from everyone else who heard her say it. The film goes so far down this rabbit hole that Fielder shows her a clip of “who’s on first?”
Elizabeth pretends to not understand the classic bit. She wants us to think that her mind works in such a unique way, that she understands the conversation so literally, that she cannot understand the joke — even after it’s been explained to her. She wants us to think she’s neurodivergent in a cute autistic way, when she’s really neurodivergent in a much scarier way.
Back to the Theranos device itself. During that scene, my wife had to squeeze my arm to prevent me from jumping out of my seat in the theater and screaming, “THAT IS NOT THE DEVICE.”
That was not the device I worked with 12 hours a day, not the device we hid from regulators, not the device that constantly failed quality controls, not the device we used to knowingly give patients inaccurate medical results. The device she showed Fielder on the kitchen table was not the reason she went to prison. Elizabeth showed him a future version of the Theranos product that was never completed and never used in order to lead Fielder down this BS semantic rabbit hole and to trick him into litigating the entirely wrong thing.
The actual device we used, called the “Edison,” could only run one blood test at a time. It could only run one type of test (immunoassays, not “any”); was not a standalone platform (it was not accurate enough to perform the initial dilution step, so we first had to put the nanotainer into a large Tecan pipetting robot); and had no microfluidics, centrifuge, or sample prep automation. The actual Edison device that Theranos used was an eight-channel pipette inside a black box that used the same chemistry and detection methods that have been used for blood tests since the 1970s. It was unimpressive and rudimentary. Of course she didn’t place the Edison on the kitchen table. It was clearly low-tech, and easily understandable. And the audience would have been revolted that it was ever used on real people. Putting it out there would not have served her narrative.
Did Fielder already know this? He either genuinely didn’t and Elizabeth bested him in their game of chess … or he did and chose not to press her on it in order to leave the audience with that sense of ambiguity. So, is he a very bad documentarian or a very good artist? Because the film would be much worse if you actually saw the device we used to test patients.
The setting of the documentary struck me as another instance where either Fielder was misled, or Fielder chose to allow Elizabeth to mislead the audience.
Elizabeth’s husband’s family owns a AAA 5-diamond resort on the famous Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego. Yet Elizabeth and Billy live in a rented, humble-looking, poorly lit condo (albeit one with great beach access). During her trial, before the cameras arrived, Elizabeth was living in an estate listed at $125 million.
She pulled this exact same move when Ken Auletta did a piece for The New Yorker on Elizabeth in 2014, when she first launched the Theranos product. He wrote “her home is a two-bedroom condo in Palo Alto, and she lives an austere life … she no longer devotes time to novels or friends, [and] doesn’t date. … Her refrigerator is all but empty, as she eats most of her meals at the office.”
In reality, she was living in a mansion in Atherton with her much-older boyfriend and Theranos executive Sunny Balwani. (Sunny, with whom she had a volatile relationship, was sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison for his role in the fraud.)
She tries to convey openness and humility by inviting cameras into the quaint little homes … that she doesn’t actually live in. I’m sure Fielder knew that she had been living at the Green Gables Estate (check out the photos) prior to his arrival, so why did he choose to not ask her about the change in scenery?
Similarly, in a recent interview, Billy says they took a private jet to fly from San Diego to Texas to begin her incarceration … so why did Fielder show them driving off to Texas in a Cybertruck? I would have loved a scene of Fielder sipping Champagne on the PJ and asking the pilots something like, “sooo …. how long have you two known each other?”
Beyond the central question of “Did Elizabeth lie?” the documentary also asks: “Is Elizabeth being abused?”
There’s a rare unambiguous answer to that question: yes. For years people have asked me, “Do you believe her when she says that Sunny abused her?” I absolutely do, but that does not excuse Elizabeth’s behavior. In fact, I’ve always thought that Elizabeth was with Sunny in part because of his abusive personality, knowing she could use it to her advantage.
I do not believe that Elizabeth started Theranos with the intent to defraud investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, and I also do not believe that she started Theranos wanting to help patients. She has shown an astounding lack of empathy toward the patients she hurt, so there’s no way she ever cared about helping them.
I believe she started Theranos wanting to be famous. She wanted to be the youngest self-made female billionaire, to be on the cover of magazines, to be the female Steve Jobs. And she did it. But she had no way out … except to blame Sunny.
I’ve always believed that she set Sunny up to be the fall guy. That she put him in a position to fail and to be the excuse for her failures. When I sent Elizabeth an email detailing many of my complaints about the Theranos failures, she didn’t respond. She forwarded it to Sunny to let him attack me and put his name on their completely inadequate responses to real concerns. When I confronted my grandfather about why he continued to sit on the Theranos board after a year of Wall Street Journal reporting and federal investigations, part of his response was that they had fired Sunny and they believed he was responsible for what had gone wrong.
Then in her criminal trial, she blamed Sunny again, and it actually worked … but only 66% of the way. Sunny was convicted of 12 of 12 counts against him, and Elizabeth was only convicted of four.
I’ve always had a hard time describing the above concept: that Sunny was abusive, but that Elizabeth used that to benefit herself. So my favorite scene in “You Can See Everything” is when Fielder perfectly describes it with the metaphor of David Blaine putting an ice pick through his hand. It’s not a trick. He actually puts the pick straight through his hand.
In the film, we see Elizabeth in what appears to be an actual abusive relationship, and that is why Amanda Seyfried (who played Holmes in the Hulu miniseries “The Dropout” and shows up in “You Can See Everything”), Fielder, and us in the audience feel real actual sympathy for her. She is not just playing the victim card, she is actually a victim.
But like David Blaine, she knows exactly what she’s doing. And she knows how to whisk eggs. She knew that Billy would jump in, take the bowl from her, and that moment would be used in the film as a microcosm of their relationship.
Another question the film leaves the audience wondering is: “Does she believe her own lies?” Again, from the narrow perspective of the San Diego condo you could have a heated debate on this topic.
But zoom out even a little bit and you see an elaborate web of lies that Elizabeth would not have constructed if she actually believed them. For example, the Securities and Exchanges Commission found that “In August 2015, Holmes met with a potential investor, during which she provided Theranos’ financial results for fiscal year 2014. These financials showed 2014 net revenues of $108 million… But Theranos’ actual financial performance bore no resemblance to the financial information Holmes shared with investors. Theranos recorded little more than $100,000 in revenue in 2014.”
During this same period of time, Elizabeth refused to show investors audited financial statements. If she truly believed they had made more than $100 million in the previous year, why bother hiding the financial statements?
In Fielder’s defense, he does cue the audience, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, that he is a compromised subject of his own documentary and may have omitted things in order to protect Elizabeth. In fact, has Fielder himself ever called this film a documentary? Or have we all interpreted how he presented this film in a way he never intended? Maybe he thinks he was making a romcom. Who even is on first?
Tyler Shultz is a scientist at heart, founder by nature, whistleblower by accident, speaker by day, venture partner by night, and a dad 24/7.