Spoilers abound.
I’m not a Nathan Fielder fan. Unpopular opinion. His affect annoys me. I’ve only ever watched clips of The Rehearsal and Nathan For You. Nonetheless, You Can See Everything, his new documentary about disgraced former CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, is a cultural event. It comes with a slew of other techlash-focused new releases: Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, the follow-up to the early Mark Zuckerberg biopic (and arguably the best film of the 2010s), The Social Network; Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI drama, Artificial (out Christmas 2026); and Musk, Alex Gibney’s documentary about the world’s first trillionaire. All of this is jumbled with the ongoing data center backlash and the controversial IPO’s of the United States two most advanced frontier labs, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Looking back at the first Techlash, which I would date from 2016 to 2022, the time period spanning the dual victories of Brexit and Donald Trump to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the stakes now feel much higher. Fake news is old news. Bot farms are presumed to be psyopping all the live-long day. No one trusts our institutions—in the U.S. at least. And deepfakes cloud our perception of reality. The truth is: we’re scanning, not reading. Images flash by as our partial attention slips between subtitled streaming content and text messages. The higher the volume of media we now consume comes at the price of not looking too deeply at what’s put in front of us.
The set-up of You Can See Everything is straight-forward. Elizabeth Holmes husband, Billy Evans, heir to a luxury hotel fortune, invites known-trickster Nathan Fielder into he and Elizabeth’s home during the month preceding her incarceration. Their angle is to tell their side of the story. They highlight disputes with coverage from The New York Times, point out that Hulu’s 2017 dramatization of the Theranos saga, The Dropout. Crucially, the miniseries ends with Holmes indictment. You Can See Everything picks up six years later after her conviction and sentencing.
I remember reading the investigative reporting by John Carreyrou in The Wall Street Journal over a decade ago. And at the time, I bought into the framing that Elizabeth Holmes was a very advanced con artist who had carefully constructed a persona that delivered the apex of the girlboss dream: a female Steve Jobs. She came up in a healthcare-focused era. Obamacare had been passed and Silicon Valley played a key role in the program’s implementation. (Many forget that when the federal government tried to create the consumer interface for health insurance marketplace’s they realized they had no idea how to design, what was at the end of the day, an e-commerce website.) Access was the keyword and Theranos promised a new invention that would enable local pharmacies (initially just CVS) to perform any blood test for a fraction of the cost of the current laboratory-based bloodwork model.
Everyone knows the Edison, as the machine was called, didn’t work, but I struggle to remember what role Holmes herself played.
Her position has always been that she did nothing wrong, and if anything, Sunny Balwani was the true architect of the scheme. Balwani was her older lover and business partner, the COO of Theranos. In You Can See Everything, Holmes’ father reminds Fielder, Holmes was only 19 years-old when she met then-40-year-old Balwani. Note: their relationship, business partnership, and downfall all occurred before the emergence of ‘age-gap discourse.’
The first half of the three-hour film drags. As I said, I don’t love Fielder. Holmes unblinking blue-eyes unsettle. Her husband’s behavior is erratic. He seems annoyed at the presence of the film crew he invited into his home and on numerous occasions interrupts filming, slams doors, and recommends Elizabeth be more cautious about sharing documents, even going so far as to caution her about letting her laptop screen be visible during filming. At the same time, he lets Fielder film him nude in the shower after a vigorous work-out. Congrats to Elizabeth for landing a wealthy, well-endowed, attractive man.
After Elizabeth reports to Federal Prison Camp Bryan, two hours east of Austin, the film predictably takes a Fielder-esque turn.
Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the Hulu series, joins Fielder, and the film becomes recursive. Seyfried reprises her much-applauded portrayal of Holmes, performing scripts Fielder created from documentary footage. We see her Holmes-ed out in the oceanside San Diego cottage where Elizabeth (or Lizzie as she’s often referred to by her family) spent their final days before reporting to Texas for incarceration. Fielder and Seyfried follow their trail, meeting Billy in his new Austin home. Despite, Evans and Holmes insistence that Seyfriend is a ‘liar,’ she’s welcomed, even allowed to play with Holmes’ children. The whole thing is uncanny.
We learn Evans has power of attorney, is licensing Holmes’ image, and become an outspoken Trump supporter. He carries a gun at all times and the cortisol has gone to his face.
The big reveal of the third act is that at the beginning of filming, Evans demanded he and Holmes’ share in the profit of the film. An odd choice since throughout the first half of the film, Holmes repeatedly insisted she didn’t care about money. She was adamant that even from prison, she would continue her quest to expand healthcare access for all. Fielder and Seyfried set out to discover if she was unaware of the deal her husband struck—or was this yet another con?
Nothing is truly answered. Fielder confronts Holmes in person at Camp Bryan. But he cannot film it. He workshops the script he recollected from notes and reads with Seyfried, trying to nail not only the words, but Holmes’ delivery. They struggle. Did she use word X or word Y? Fielder is unsure. It echoes an earlier scene where Holmes insists her use of the word ‘can’ (as in the Edison can do any test). Fielder presses and additional context reveals she believes it can do so if the requisite chemistry for the machine is developed. She’s splitting hairs, which is what you would expect a conman to do, but as someone who has worked with many early-stage founders, grandiose claims are common. There is nothing more Silicon Valley than making the most expansive claims possible in a pitch, while still remaining on the side of technically true.
The film hinges on word choice. Did Amanda Seyfried ‘lie’ in her portrayal of Holmes? She admits it’s a dramatization and defends the research the director and producers put behind the film. But didn’t the famous scene of the sputtering Edison shooting out blood happen? She doesn’t know. Probably no one does.
I’m left feeling the same way. What hard evidence is there against Holmes? What role did Balwani play in her life trajectory? What choices did she knowingly make? Which ones were done in the dark? We’re left with a Holmes who is sequestered from the public, while her husband, armed with power of attorney, posts on X under her name. Was the ultimate girlboss just a fall-woman? Holmes comes off odd. She can’t understand the semantic of Abbott and Costello’s famous “Who’s on First?” skit. Is she autistic? Is she lying?
In the end, Seyfried seems unsettled by her own role in crafting the fictional persona most people know as Elizabeth Holmes. Fielder seems shaken and unsure. Evans rescinds his demand for profit-sharing from the film. The New York Times never provides hard evidence (i.e. a recording) that proves Holmes admitted her public persona was a character she created. The audience is left with the sense that the depictions from the mainstream media and Hollywood are in fact depictions. Fraudsters use partial truths to sell shares. But the media sells partial truths, too, as of course they have, too. Even The New York Times is not omniscient.
It all boils down to intent and incentives. Silicon Valley is selling stories. Hollywood is too. That’s not to say Holmes’ story is correct. There’s a reality in which she has convinced herself of her own lies. After all, delusion is the story we sell ourselves.
