'You Can't Make These Things Up': Why We're Fascinated by Elizabeth Holmes

The entrepreneur-turned-con is the subject of a new Oscar documentary that takes an unusual look at his strange legacy. David Agus' first encounter with Elizabeth Holmes at a health conference was shocking. The Holmes he met in the green room was personable and pleasant. The Holmes he interviewed on stage was completely different. "The tone changed: this deep voice, very

Diagos' first encounter with Elizabeth Holmes at a health conference was shocking. The Holmes he met in the green room was personable and pleasant. The Holmes he interviewed on stage was completely different.

"The tone changed: This deep voice, very serious," recalls Agus, a cancer specialist, by phone from Los Angeles. It was as if I had met someone and then interviewed a separate person. That transition from the green room to the stage—I've never experienced anything like that before.

Holmes is not like you and me. When he founded Theranos, he was still a teenager, using technologies that could perform medical tests using just a few drops of blood. He cultivated a distinctive persona: blond hair, an unblinking gaze, a husky voice and a black turtleneck worn in homage to Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Holmes charmed investors and board members including Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, Carlos Slim and former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz. She became America's youngest self-made female billionaire. But it was all an illusion, a confidence trick built on a scam. Holmes' brilliant career ended in scandal and prison.

"You can't make these things up," says Margaret O'Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. "If a screenwriter tried to make this up out of whole cloth, people would be like, no, that's unbelievable. The story is true, though. Who is the real Elizabeth Holmes? That's an unanswered question."

Perhaps the answer lies in You Can See Everything, a reality-bending documentary released in the US on Friday, in which Holmes goes head-to-head with absurdist comedian Nathan Fielder, who co-directs with Lance Oppenheim. The footage was shot 34 days before he reported to the federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, to begin his 11-year sentence for wire fraud and conspiracy.

That fate seemed unthinkable in 2003, when Holmes dropped out of Stanford University at age 19 and founded Theranos, promising to revolutionize the multibillion-dollar blood-testing industry by using microfluidics to perform hundreds of tests on just a few drops of blood.

He found a receptive audience among investors who wanted Silicon Valley to offer more than Facebook friends. O'Mara explains: "She stands out in her rise as a female entrepreneur at a time when men dominated the scene and she was doing something that was in technology, but technology seemed to change the world.

The challenge hadn't started yet, but where there was criticism from Silicon Valley was, "Hey, you've got all these smart people and all you're doing is building apps? Why don't you do something a little more meaningful?'' And, "Hey, you've got all these smart people, but they all seem to be men."

"She was going against gender expectations, she was going to be the female Steve Jobs, she made herself less feminine and she also made herself less young," O'Mara adds.

Holmes ran the company with Ramesh "Sonny" Balwani, a businessman 19 years her senior, while keeping their romance a secret. Together they raised $945 million. Theranos had not released any data, but Holmes was a charismatic and persuasive presence in the boardroom.

"You know how you walk into a room and there's maybe 10 people at a table and they're all arguing? Suddenly someone speaks and the whole room says, "Yeah, I'll go that way." He had this ability.

"I saw how he was able to influence people. That's great if you're Steve Jobs. It's very difficult health-wise because we have to be data-driven, not personality-driven."

As of 2014, Theranos was worth $9 billion. At the age of 30, with a net worth of $4.5 billion, Holmes was named the youngest self-made female billionaire in the United States.

"Although he can quote Jane Austen," the New Yorker wrote, "he no longer devotes time to novels or friends, has no dates, no television, and hasn't taken a vacation in ten years." His fridge is completely empty because he eats most of his meals in the office. He is a vegetarian and a heavy drinker. Parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce and celery.

The heady atmosphere lured elder statesmen like Schultz, who served as a bridge between Washington and Silicon Valley during the Ronald Reagan era. Despite not having specialized expertise in in vitro diagnostics, he joined the Theranos board in 2011, when he was in his 90s. "He was attracted to the idea that here was a smart young man trying to do something more meaningful than building an app," says O'Mara. But there was not enough precision."

In his biography, The Nation Service, journalist Philip Taubman describes how those around Schultz worried that his enthusiasm had interfered with Holmes's personal affection. Schultz talked to her on the phone almost every day and invited her to family Christmas dinners. Holmes encouraged her attention and leaned closer as they sat together.

Schultz even encouraged his grandson, Tyler Schultz, to do a summer internship at Theranos before joining the company full time. Tyler eventually became convinced that Holmes was exaggerating what his technology could do. He took his concerns to the Wall Street Journal, whose investigation into the company was crucial to unraveling its web of deception.

Holmes suspected that Tyler was behind the revelations. His lawyers chased him and he was put under surveillance, scaring him and looking to his grandfather for protection. But George Schultz refused to cut ties with Holmes. According to Taubman, he tried to mediate between the two rather than stand by his grandson. George Shultz died in 2021 at the age of 100.

Scientists also had their doubts about Holmes' grand promises. "The problem with blood is that it clots and when you do these little fluids, it gets blocked. He wouldn't give me an answer as to why it didn't bother him. To me, that was an early red flag. The emperor without clothes was obvious because he was either super secretive or the way he was trying to explain things didn't make sense," Agus recalls.

John Ivanidis, a professor of medicine and health research at Stanford University, happened to work in the building that used to serve as Theranos' headquarters. In 2015, he published a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that highlighted the striking lack of peer-reviewed evidence supporting Theranos' claims.

"They wanted me to give it up and meet Elizabeth Holmes, and maybe co-write a new Jama piece that says I've seen the light," he says. When Ioannidis urged them to publish validation data, Theranos cited 100-plus patent filings. "I looked at these patents and they were mostly nonsensical. One was titled something like 'how to do clinical research'—vague and unspecific."

But in assessing Holmes' motivations, Ioannidis offers a nuanced view. "I don't think anyone can be in her mind. My most likely interpretation is that she believed she would start that wave - attract capital, capital, talent, expertise and make it real.

I don't think he was just a charlatan. He was power-oriented, but in Silicon Valley, many people are power-oriented. "He saw that the way to do it was to get the power first and then get the people and the technology to make it happen."

Holmes stepped down as CEO in 2018 and the company collapsed that same year. Holmes' trial led to his sentencing in 2022 to more than 11 years in prison for fraud and conspiracy. The scandal was chronicled in a book, numerous podcasts, and the biographical miniseries The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried.

You Can See It All offers an intimate and often confusing look at Holmes' home life with his partner, Billy Evans, and their two young children during the 34 days before he reports to prison in May 2023.

Lavalier microphones record Holmes' every breath as he reads bedtime stories to the children, sometimes 12 hours a day. Meanwhile, Evans is filmed naked in the shower, whisking eggs while her cook corrects her. They fixate on past media profiles and argue that journalists made up his character.

The biggest reveal happens off-camera. Even as he prepared to enter prison, Holmes and Evans were actively planning a new medical technology startup. In 2025, two years after his conviction, Evans sought $18.5 million for Haemanthus — a company that claimed to own a patent for a device that it claimed would scan blood, urine and saliva samples using a laser.

I'm a fool, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame? As Silicon Valley pours unprecedented sums into artificial intelligence, O'Mara believes the lessons of Theranos extend beyond Holmes himself. "The cautionary tale echoes a larger Silicon Valley moral tale of placing too much faith and power in the hands of a young person or a small circle of people.

The founder culture and Silicon Valley obsession that helped make Elizabeth Holmes what she is is still alive and well and stronger than ever. We have never seen more power and wealth concentrated in the hands of the few. We have not seen anything like this even in the golden age of America.

You can see everything now in the US, in Australia on November 12th and in the UK on November 20th.