Once a symbol of tech's promise, Holmes was brought down by her false claims about a blood-testing device. Now gripping new film You Can See Everything explores her baffling character.
Nathan Fielder did not set out to make a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. As he explained on stage after the premiere of You Can See Everything at the New York Film Festival two weeks ago, at first he was just curious to meet her. He was far from alone in wondering about a woman who has captivated public attention, for better and then for worse, for more than a decade.
Warning: This article contains mild spoilers for You Can See Everything
In 2014 Holmes was heralded as a self-made billionaire and founder of Theranos, a health technology company that claimed to have an invented a device that could diagnose illnesses with a single pinprick of blood. She had cultivated a striking image, encapsulated in her appearance on the cover of Fortune magazine: a disconcerting wide-eyed stare, bright red lips and a Steve Jobs-style black turtleneck. But she became an even more fascinating figure after her spectacular fall, when it turned out the device wasn't working and sometimes gave false results. Convicted of defrauding investors, she went to federal prison in May 2023.
Holmes's continuing fame has been perfectly in sync with the times: once a glamorous symbol of tech's promise in the heady days of Silicon Valley, she is an avatar of danger and overreach today, when scepticism about big tech is...
Elizabeth Holmes spent some of her last days out of prison with a film crew. She was trying, it seems, to clear her name. "You really feel you did nothing wrong?" Nathan Fielder, who co-directed th...