Elizabeth Holmes
USA Comedian and satirist Nathan Fielder is preparing to publish a documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, the former business executive convicted of defrauding investors in connection with health technology company Theranos.A trailer for the film, titled “You Can See Everything” shows 
Holmes and Fielder seated close to one another locked in eye contact as she tells him she is not trying to “deceive” him.
The comedian briefly breaks character and asks her, “you’re being real right now?” to which she smiles and replies “I’m always being real.”The film debuted over the weekend during a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival after which Fielder took questions from the audience, The New York Times reported.
“I don’t know why I’m there,” Fielder said during a question and answer after the USA screening, according to the Times.
“I’m really struggling to this day to understand what I experienced,” he continued, according to the USA Times, adding, “I’m excited for this movie to come out and for people to help me with what I experienced.”
Holmes is currently serving time in federal prison for a scheme to defraud investors in the blood-testing company Theranos. She invited Fielder and filmmaker Lance Oppenheim into her rented home in Southern California just weeks before she reported to prison in 2023.
The film, which was produced in conjunction with A24, is reportedly three hours long and slated to hit theaters on Oct. 16.
Audience members were not told what movie they were about to see. Their phones were confiscated and zipped into security pouches. During the screening, staff members scanned the crowd with night-vision goggles, ensuring there was no surreptitious recording.
When “You Can See Everything,” a three-hour documentary about Theranos founder and convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado on Sunday, Sept. 6., almost no one had heard of it.
By the end of the screening, stunned industry observers and critics had identified a bizarre new contender to Oscar season.
“What the f— did I just watch? One of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen,” Matt Neglia, founder of the entertainment and awards-prediction website Next Best Picture, posted on X.
Los Angeles-based television and radio journalist Scott Mantz called it “FRIGGIN’ BRILLIANT,” adding that it is “gripping … existential.”
Since distributor A24 dropped a cringy teaser trailer just minutes after Sunday’s festival screening started, it has amassed more than 3 million views on YouTube.
The upcoming documentary “You Can See Everything” is expected to feature disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes insisting she’s innocent of the fraud she was convicted of, based on early reviews—claims that Holmes, or someone on her behalf, has already long been making on social media as she seeks clemency from President Donald Trump and heaps praise on him on X.
Key Facts
Filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim debuted “You Can See Everything” at the Telluride Film Festival on Sunday, a previously secret documentary about Holmes, who was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 11 years in prison after she helped conceal that Theranos’ blood testing technology did not work as it claimed.
Fielder and Oppenheim conducted extensive interviews with Holmes right before she was incarcerated in 2023, with reviews of the documentary suggesting Holmes defends herself and Theranos’ technology in the film and tells the filmmakers she is still trying to pitch the company to investors.
At 18, she already displayed an intransigence that would apparently continue and drive the company she would found the following year.
Phyllis Gardner, an expert in clinical pharmacology at Stanford, recalled discussing Holmes's skin-patch idea and telling her it "wouldn't work".
"She just stared through me," Dr Gardner told the BBC.
"And she just seemed absolutely confident of her own brilliance. She wasn't interested in my expertise and it was upsetting."
Meteoric rise
Months later Holmes dropped out of Stanford aged 19 and launched Theranos, this time coming up with an apparently revolutionary way of testing blood from a simple finger prick.
The documentary comes more than a year after Holmes’ X account was revived in August 2025—she hadn’t posted before that since 2015—and the account has since posted frequently, often protesting Holmes’ innocence from the fraud charges against her.
Powerful people were enthralled and invested without seeing audited financial accounts.
US Treasury Secretary George Schultz, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and America's richest family, the Waltons, were among her backers.
The support lent her credibility, as did her demeanour.
"I knew she'd had this brilliant idea and that she had managed to convince all these investors and scientists," said Dr Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, who met her for lunch in 2015.
"She was self-assured, but when I asked her several questions about her technology she didn't look like she understood," added Dr Flier, who never formally assessed her technology. "It seemed a bit odd, but I didn't come away thinking it was a fraud."
Dr Flier ended up inviting her to join the medical school's Board of Fellows, which he regrets, although she was removed when the scandal broke.It began to unravel in 2015 when a whistleblower raised concerns about Theranos' flagship testing device, the Edison. The Wall Street Journal wrote a series of damning exposes claiming the results were unreliable and that the firm had been using commercially available machines made by other manufacturers for most of its testing.Lawsuits piled up, partners cut ties and in 2016 US regulators banned Holmes from operating a blood-testing service for two years.In 2018 Theranos was dissolved.In March that year, Holmes settled civil charges from financial regulators that she had fraudulently raised $700m from investors.
But three months later she was arrested, along with Mr Balwani, on criminal charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Prosecutors said she knowingly misled patients about the tests and vastly exaggerated the firm's performance to financial backers.
As the Theranos scandal reached trial, commentators said it was remarkable how tightly Holmes clung to her original story, and people who knew her said they doubt she has changed.
Since the trial, Holmes has been living in California with partner William "Billy" Evans, 27, an heir to the Evans Hotel Group. They had a son in July 2021 and she is pregnant with their second child.
Holmes's attorneys had said she should not face prison time on the grounds that she was not a danger to society. They offered testimony from more than 130 people on her behalf, including Senator Cory Booker.
Holmes cannot have a phone and post to social media herself from prison, with NPR reporting her husband Billy Evans is posting them on her behalf.
The U.S. Pardon Attorney’s Office confirmed in January that Holmes had applied for a commutation—meaning Trump would erase the rest of her prison sentence, but not fully pardon her—and many of Holmes’ posts have praised the president, his allies and some of his administration’s policies.
It’s unclear if the documentary and its renewed attention on Holmes could impact her clemency efforts.
Fielder told the Telluride audience Sunday that neither Holmes nor her husband Evans have seen the final documentary yet. Holmes’ X account did share the teaser trailer for “You Can See Everything” on Sunday, quoting Holmes’ words
in the trailer by adding the caption, “I’m always being real.” Her account has also responded to several posts about the documentary, responding to A24’s post with the documentary’s trailer and writing, “Might as well tag me.” “Breathe in, breathe out,” Holmes’ account also wrote to a user saying they were “every emotion” about the trailer, and she responded to an independent film journalist who complained no one believed their reports about Fielder visiting Holmes in prison before the documentary was officially announced. “It hurts to be called a fraud when you aren’t,” Holmes wrote, with her X post receiving a community note that points out she was convicted of wire fraud and her case was upheld on appeal.
Holmes—or whoever’s posting on her behalf—has repeatedly posted in favor of her innocence, saying in a lengthy post in December 2025 that while she “take[s] accountability for [Theranos] failing” and the company “had many operational errors … I NEVER LIED.” Holmes is “innocent of what I was convicted of,” she alleged, writing her “mistakes were of naivete never malice or any bad intent.” The former CEO has also written posts opposing prosecutors’ legal arguments in her case, railed against the federal justice system and denied she founded Theranos in order to become wealthy. “All I have ever cared about was helping people,” Holmes’ account posted in October 2025, noting she “had $4.B in stock” and “$2B in offers for personal shares” when Theranos was afloat but “never sold a single share.” Holmes’ X account has teased her desire to tell her “real story,” also writing in October, “I will never be silenced again. A storm is coming.” Holmes’ X account does not have any indication she’s hoping to still pitch Theranos to investors, as reviews suggest she told Fielder and Oppenheim, but she has described the company as having “unfinished business.”
What Has Elizabeth Holmes Said About Trump And His Allies?
Holmes previously co-hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but more recently has posted tweets that appear supportive of Trump and his administration. She praised an executive order the president issued on health care in January—around the time her request for clemency was revealed—arguing it would “lead to better care and lower costs,” and supported Trump’s executive order restricting transgender women in women’s prisons, writing in September,
“This problem was solved in the US within 24 hours of President Trump coming into office.” Holmes also shared a photo of Trump and billionaire Elon Musk—whom she has also repeatedly praised—in September, and has supported Vice President JD Vance, likening him in February to “Dune” character Lisan al-Gaib. She added a post from Musk’s Grok chatbot describing Vance as an “outsider from rust-belt sands” who’s “prophesied to unite fractured tribes against coastal elites and bureaucratic worms.” Beyond the president and Vance, Holmes’ account has posted in support of such Trump allies as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and his wife Erika, and has shared her newfound opposition to abortion after she became pregnant following her indictment. She also shared a Politico article that discussed how she was now being “embraced” by Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, arguing she viewed the Trump-friendly “MAHA” movement as being “about leveraging technology to cut the cost of healthcare, and save lives.”
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Key Background
Holmes initially gained widespread success as the founder of Theranos, a company that attracted significant capital from major investors based on its promises to revolutionize blood testing and make health care more accessible. Forbes valued Holmes’ net worth at $4.5 billion in 2015, making her the
youngest self-made female billionaire at the time, before The Wall Street Journal first reported issues with Theranos’ technology, sparking subsequent investigations and, eventually, Holmes’ 2018 indictment. (Forbes revised her net worth to $0 in 2016, years before she was criminally charged.) She was convicted in 2022 on wire fraud charges, though a jury acquitted her of other fraud counts, and she was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. Fielder and Oppenheim’s documentary comes after Holmes and Theranos’ story was previously put on screen in the 2019 HBO documentary “The Inventor” and in the 2022 Hulu television series “The Dropout,” in which actress Amanda Seyfried portrayed the Theranos founder.
On Theranos Inc.’s website, company founder Elizabeth Holmes holds up a tiny vial to show how the startup’s “breakthrough advancements have made it possible to quickly process the full range of laboratory tests from a few drops of blood.”
The company offers more than 240 tests, ranging from cholesterol to cancer. It claims its technology can work with just a finger prick. Investors have poured more than $400 million into Theranos, valuing it at $9 billion and her majority stake at more than half that. The 31-year-old Ms. Holmes’s bold talk and black turtlenecks draw comparisons to Apple Inc. cofounder Steve Jobs.
In 2014, Elizabeth Holmes, then 30 years old, was on top of the world. A Stanford University drop-out, she had founded a company valued at $9bn (£6.5bn) for supposedly bringing about a revolution in diagnosing disease.
With a few drops of blood, Theranos promised that its Edison test could detect conditions such as cancer and diabetes quickly without the hassle of needles. Bigwigs from Henry Kissinger to general James Mattis sat on the board.
But by 2015, the seams were coming apart, and within a year, Holmes was exposed as a fake. The technology she touted didn't work at all, and by 2018 the company she founded had collapsed.
In January, she was convicted by a jury in California on four counts of fraud, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
The jury found her not guilty on four other charges and failed to reach a verdict on three more. Holmes, who had pleaded not guilty to all charges, sought a new trial but those requests were denied.
She was sentenced on Friday to 11 years and three months in prison.
During the trial Holmes accused her ex-boyfriend and business partner, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, of emotional and sexual abuse at the time of the alleged crimes, impairing her mental state.
Balwani, 56, who faced the same fraud charges, was convicted in July and is due to be sentenced next month. He had called the claims "outrageous".
High pressure beginnings
Despite being the subject of a book, HBO documentary, TV series and an upcoming film, it is still unclear why Holmes took such a gamble on technology she knew didn't work.She was raised in a comfortably well-off family in Washington DC, and was a polite but withdrawn child, according to people who knew her.Inventor and businessman Richard Fuisz, 81, speculated there must have been immense pressure on Holmes to succeed. His family lived next door to the Holmes family for years, but they fell out when Theranos sued him over a patent dispute in 2011 (it was later settled).Theranos founder hit with criminal charges
When to fire the boss: A tale of three sackings
Holmes's parents spent much of their careers as bureaucrats on Capitol Hill, but "they were very interested in status" and "lived for connections", he told the BBC. Her father's great-great-grandfather founded Fleischmann's Yeast, which changed America's bread industry, and the family was very conscious about its lineage, he said.At age nine, the young Elizabeth wrote a letter to her father declaring that what she "really want[ed] out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn't know was possible to do".When she got to Stanford University in 2002 to study chemical engineering, she came up with an idea for a patch that could scan the wearer for infections and release antibiotics as needed.
Posted on 2026/09/09 08:58 AM