Georeactor Blog

Nathan Fielder just released a trailer for You Can See Everything, a documentary he was filming with Elizabeth Holmes's family in 2023 and continued after prison visits in 2025.

• Despite the news reports, the Bad Blood book, The Dropout TV series, podcast, The Inventor documentary, a trial, and an ongoing Twitter account, there is a core audience which can't get enough of Elizabeth Holmes.
• It's an information-poor discussion - people often talk about Theranos as Silicon Valley and VC recklessness, or an invention sabotaged by Big Pharma, when it was actually a company peculiarly backed by family foundations and making deals with pharmacy and grocery giants.
• The story is also very gendered - everyone focuses on Holmes changing her voice, charming these old guys; is she a "girlboss"; did she have children to manipulate the justice system; the relationship with Sunny Balwani was him being abusive, or her setting up a fall guy (The Dropout TV series leaned on this a bit)

There is also something to the whole 'charm' story where I'm not going to be able to find the root of it, but aside from the Shultz family story, one of the witnesses (a former lab director) came to Holmes's house in 2022 to apologize for his testimony.

That charm intensifies the positives and the negatives - you don't have similar intensity over failed bio research labs hidden inside of homes in Las Vegas and California, which have been mostly unexplained but maybe sold a million junk covid tests?

It's hard to believe that Theranos was around for 12 years before its unravelling, because the key stories are concentrated on the last few years when it was emerging as a big name, then publicly unraveling. Then it was a bombshell when a story dropped in May 2018 that Holmes and Balwani had been in a relationship almost the entire time (before then, her Wikipedia article did not mention Balwani).
I think painting Holmes as "The Dropout" cemented a neat story that she left Stanford to try something for a couple of years and got caught up, rather than a long deliberate process which built up a corporate culture.

Holmes (smartly) said little publicly between Theranos and her trial, and only a few former employees have been open to telling a story. Any post-Theranos updates have been mysterious but deeply personal - it bothered people that she got a husky and described it as a wolf, that she acted like a casual longlost friend when she met former employees. So there wasn't new news about the science or business plan or her family. Instead people were watching the TV show and developing a parasocial love-hate relationship with TV Holmes.
Agreeing to a documentary is/was likely a new front in a multi-prong project to get a commutation or pardon. Even failing that, Holmes and her husband could someday start a new health lifestyle company, or (this is my new realization) get into peptides or probiotics or supplements while that market is hot.

One last thing which caught me off guard was how many people are hearing about Elizabeth Holmes for the first time. They are reacting strongly to the trailer and don't know what to think of Nathan Fielder (who I can understand being niche), but they have no idea what Holmes did and why there's this interview with her. I undertand it's because Theranos crashed and burned 10 years ago and there is a whole generation of younger internet users, but omg.