Theranos whistleblower barely recognizes Elizabeth Holmes in new documentary: ‘The Elizabeth that I knew completely commanded a room’

The new documentary You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, is drawing crowds to theaters. It earned an estimated $15 million in its opening weekend, the second-biggest documentary debut ever, behind only Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The film follows Holmes in the final weeks before she reported to prison in 2023. Years after the Theranos scandal erupted, Holmes still maintains she never lied, despite her 2022 conviction for defrauding investors.

Tyler Shultz, a former Theranos research engineer who helped expose the company’s faulty blood-testing technology, barely recognized the woman on screen.

“The Elizabeth that I knew completely commanded a room, even if that room was full of secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, generals, senators. She would own a room,” Shultz told CBS Mornings on Monday.

Now, he said, she looks like “a broken woman.” But he still doesn’t feel she’s owning up to her mistakes.

‘That is not the device’

In one scene, Holmes lays out the components of a Theranos blood-testing device on a kitchen table. She tells Fielder it could run hundreds of tests if the necessary chemistry were developed.

Shultz said that when he saw the scene in the theater, his wife had to stop him from shouting “THAT IS NOT THE DEVICE,” he wrote in an opinion essay published Monday in STAT.

According to Shultz, Holmes showed a future version of the product that was never completed and never used on patients. The Edison machine he worked with 12 hours a day was different, he said. It could run only one blood test at a time, constantly failed quality controls, and gave patients inaccurate results.

Instead of pressing on what the machine actually did, Fielder ended up debating what Holmes meant by “could.” Was she describing technology that already worked, or technology that might work someday?

Shultz wrote that either Holmes “bested” Fielder “in their game of chess” or Fielder let her mislead the audience.

Fielder has said the experience left him baffled. “I still am not sure to this day what I experienced,” he said at a Q&A after an early screening, People reported. He also said he hoped audiences could “help me understand what I went through.”

The gap between Holmes’ image and reality

Holmes has long cultivated the image of a work-obsessed founder who cared more about changing health care than making money and lived modestly despite her fortune. In a 2014 CNN interview, she said being a billionaire “hasn’t changed my life at all” and that it was “not why we’re doing this.”

In the documentary, she and her partner, Billy Evans, live with their two young children in a modest-looking San Diego rental. Shultz criticized the film for not looking “far beyond the walls” of that home. And the home wasn’t exactly modest: Realtor.com estimates the oceanfront property is worth $5.8 million.

During her trial, Holmes lived on the grounds of the sprawling Green Gables estate in Woodside, Calif., which was listed for $135 million at the time.

Shultz pointed to an even earlier version of the modest-living story. In 2014, The New Yorker described Holmes as living in a two-bedroom Palo Alto condo, with little time for friends or dating. Shultz said she was actually living in an Atherton mansion with Sunny Balwani, then her boyfriend and a Theranos executive.

Who created ‘Elizabeth Holmes’?

Then there’s the argument over who created the character of Elizabeth Holmes.

In a 2023 New York Times profile, Holmes was quoted saying that actors portraying her were “playing a character I created.”

In the documentary, Holmes denies saying that. She insists she said the actors created the character themselves. She and Evans say they recorded most of their media interviews, but they couldn’t produce the recording when Fielder asked for it. The Times stands by its reporting.

Shultz doesn’t dismiss Holmes’ suffering. He wrote that he believes she was abused by Balwani, but that being a victim doesn’t excuse her own conduct. Shultz has said in the past that he was so afraid of Theranos that he slept with a knife under his pillow.

Once a billionaire, Holmes is now serving a federal prison sentence in Texas.