Elizabeth Holmes and You Can See Everything: The Real Theranos Story Behind the A24 Documentary

October 2015. A television studio. The lights are hot, and the clock is running. Elizabeth Holmes is 31 years old. She is wearing a black turtleneck. Her voice is deep, slow, and steady. On paper, she is worth $4.5 billion. She is the youngest self-made female billionaire in America. That morning, the Wall Street Journal has published a story about her company, Theranos. It says the machine she built her empire on, a little box called the Edison, gives inaccurate results. It says most of the company's blood tests are not even run on the Edison; they are run on ordinary machines bought from other companies. That evening, she sits down across from Jim Cramer on CNBC's Mad Money. Doesn't dance around it. The article was pretty brutal, he says. Holmes doesn't blink. This is what happens when you work to change things, she tells him. First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world. It is a perfect line. Calm. Certain. A little bit heroic. Within 3 years, her company will be gone. Within 8 years, she will walk into a federal prison camp in Texas. And in 2026, the story will come back one more time, on cinema screens across America. In April 2023, 34 days before she is due to report to prison, Elizabeth Holmes does something nobody expects. She invites a film crew into her life. The filmmakers are Nathan Fielder, the comedian behind Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, and the documentary director Lance Oppenheim. The studio was A24. According to reporting on the film, Holmes had already approached A24 about a documentary before the 2 directors signed on. Vanity Fair described her as utterly certain that everyone else would believe her too, if only she had an opportunity to speak her truth. So, the cameras move in. Holmes, her partner Billy Evans, and their 2 small children in a rented beach house in Del Mar, California. 34 days of footage, right up to the morning she reports to Federal Prison Camp Bryan. The film is called You Can See Everything. It premiered as a secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival on September 6th, 2026. The audience didn't know what they were about to watch, They had to hand over their phones. It opened in American theaters on October 16th and expands wide on October 23rd. It runs almost 3 hours. Critics have called it one of the films of the year. But even the people who made it say they could not fully figure her out. The moment they knew they had a film was when the crew itself could not agree on what was happening in that house. Why can't we make sense of what's happening in this house? he asked. That is the question this episode is about. How did one young woman convince some of the most powerful people in America to hand her hundreds of millions of dollars? What did she actually build? What did she actually do? To understand how she ended up in that beach house, we have to go back to Washington, D.C., and to a family that used to be very, very rich. Elizabeth Ann Holmes is born on February 3rd, 1984, Washington, D.C. Her father, Christian Holmes IV, works in energy and later in government agencies like USAID and the Environmental Protection Agency. Her mother, Noelle, works as a congressional committee staffer. Comfortable people. Serious people. But there is a ghost in the family tree. One of Elizabeth's great-great-great-grandfathers is Charles Louis Fleischmann, a Hungarian immigrant who founded Fleischmann's Yeast, Generations earlier, the family had been one of the richest in America. That money is long gone. A family friend, Joseph Fuisz, later put it this way: I think the parents very much yearned for the days of yore when the family was one of the richest in America, and I think Elizabeth channeled that, and at a young age. When she is about 9, according to her father's later account, Elizabeth writes him a letter. In it, she says, what I really want out of life is to discover something new, something mankind didn't know was possible to do. Relatives remember another answer from around that age. When grown-ups asked what she wanted to be, she didn't say astronaut. She said billionaire. The family moves to Houston. She goes to St. John's School, She teaches herself to code, and she later said she ran her first business in high school, selling software tools to universities in China. Her parents hire a Mandarin tutor. Before she finishes high school, she is attending Stanford's summer Mandarin program. Keep that detail in mind, because it is on one of those Stanford trips to China that she meets the man who will shape the next 15 years of her life. In 2002, she enrolls at Stanford to study chemical engineering. She lands work as a student researcher in the School of Engineering. She is 18, and she is in a hurry. That same year, on a Stanford Mandarin trip to Beijing, she meets Ramesh Balwani. Everyone calls him Sunny. He is a software entrepreneur, 19 years older than her, and at the time, he is married to someone else. He divorces that year, By 2003, the two are romantically involved. They will keep the relationship hidden from almost everyone for more than a decade. After her freshman year, she works in a lab at the Genome Institute of Singapore. The work is testing for SARS. Samples are collected the old way, with syringes, tube after tube. Holmes has said she is afraid of needles. She would later point to that fear as part of what drove her. Back at Stanford, She files her first patent application, for a wearable patch that would deliver drugs and monitor the blood. In October 2003, something else happens. A police report obtained years later by NPR shows that she called the police and reported that she had been sexually assaulted at a fraternity house on campus. At her trial, she testified about that night, and said that in its aftermath, she decided she would build a life by building a company. In March 2004, she drops out. She takes the money her parents had set aside for her education, and she uses it as seed money. The company is first called Real-Time Cures. She drops the name after deciding too many people are skeptical of the word cure. The new name mixes therapy and diagnosis: Theranos. The pitch is enormous. Take a few drops of blood from the tip of a finger. Run hundreds of tests on it, fast and cheap, in a box small enough to sit in a pharmacy or a living room. No needles, no vials, no waiting a week for a lab. Not every expert buys it. She pitches the idea to Phyllis Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford. Gardner's answer is short. I don't think your idea is going to work. Several other experts tell her the same thing. Here is the first move that made Elizabeth Holmes who she was. She does not argue with the people who say no. She goes around them, to the people who might say yes. Her advisor, the chemical engineering professor Channing Robertson, believes in her. He becomes the company's first board member. He opens doors to investors. One of the first is Tim Draper, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and the father of a childhood friend. He reportedly cuts her a check for $1 million after hearing the pitch. By December 2004, working out of a rented basement near the Stanford campus, the 20-year-old dropout has raised about $6 million at a valuation of $30 million. She is not selling a product. There is no product. She is selling a future, and she is very, very good at it. Watch how she builds the character. She admires Steve Jobs, so she dresses like him. The black turtleneck becomes the uniform. She has given different accounts of where it started. One employee said she suggested the Jobs look in 2007. She speaks in a deep, slow baritone. Former colleagues and professors later said that was not her natural voice. Her family maintained it was. In 2023, speaking to the New York Times, she used a higher voice and confirmed the low one was not natural. She talks about mission, about a world where no one has to say goodbye too soon. Investors leave the room believing. Behind the curtain, things are harder. Avi Tavanian, a former top Apple executive, joins the board in 2006. He grows skeptical about the company's finances and progress. He leaves at the end of 2007 in an acrimonious split under legal threats he believed were retaliation. Years later, he said, I would never expect anyone would behave the way that she behaved as a CEO. And believe me, I worked for Steve Jobs. I saw some crazy things. But Elizabeth took it to a new level. In 2009, Sunny Balwani officially joins Theranos as president and chief operating officer. He had been advising her from the start. Their relationship stays secret from the board. And still, the money keeps coming. By the end of 2010, Theranos has raised more than $92 million. That year, a round values it at $1 billion. In July 2011, Holmes is introduced to George Shultz, Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, Treasury Secretary under Richard Nixon, 90 years old and still one of the most connected men in America. They meet for 2 hours. He joins the board that month. This is the second move that defined her. Not engineers, not lab scientists, Statesman. Over the next 3 years, Shultz helps bring in almost the entire outside board: Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former Senators Sam Nunn and Bill Frist, retired Admiral Gary Rughead, a Marine general named James Mattis who would later become Secretary of Defense, former Wells Fargo chief Dick Kossevovich, Riley Bechtel, of the Bechtel engineering empire. One magazine profile would call it the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history. Think about what that board does for a 27-year-old founder. It is a wall of trust. An investor looks at those names and assumes someone already checked. A retailer looks at those names and assumes the science is real. Nobody on the board is a lab medicine expert. Critics would later point out it was mostly diplomats and generals, but in a pitch meeting, that wall is almost impossible to climb. She names the device after Thomas Edison. As one account has it, she explained, we tried everything else and it failed, so let's call it the Edison. Now she needs distribution. Places where ordinary people will actually walk in and give blood. In 2012, Safeway, the grocery chain, commits about $350 million to remodel some 800 stores with clinics for Theranos testing. The clinics are built. The deadlines slip. The deal would end in 2015 without ever really launching. Walgreens is the big one. In September 2013, Theranos and Walgreens announce in-store blood draws. Wellness centers inside drugstores, starting in Arizona and California. Holmes wants a world where a blood test costs a few dollars and takes a few drops. Until that moment, Theranos had run in stealth mode. No press releases, barely a website. 10 years of near-total silence. Then, in one move, she goes public with a partner every American has walked into. Here is how she treated secrecy. Former employees said teams were walled off from each other. Staff later described the culture she and Balwani ran as one of secrecy and fear, and said people who raised concerns were usually marginalized or fired. To believers, it looked like protecting trade secrets. To critics, it looked like keeping anyone from seeing the whole picture. The money now comes from the biggest names in American business. The Walton family, Rupert Murdoch, Betsy DeVos and her family, the Cox family of Cox Enterprises, Carlos Slim, Larry Ellison. According to John Carreyrou's reporting, the Waltons put in about $150 million, Murdoch about $121 million, the DeVos family and the Cox family about $100 million each. 2014 is the year she becomes famous. Theranos is valued at about $9 billion. It has raised more than $400 million. She owns about half the company. She is on the COVID of Fortune, Forbes, Inc., The New York Times Style Magazine. Forbes ranks her number 110 on the Forbes 400, the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. The New Yorker profiles her. Her name sits sits on 18 U.S. patents and 66 foreign ones. 2015 piles on more: Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People, Glamour's Woman of the Year, the Horatio Alger Award— its youngest recipient ever— a seat on the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows. President Barack Obama names her a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. Forbes puts her net worth at $4.5 billion. Let's slow down on what $9 billion really means here. A valuation is not money in a bank. It is a price. If an investor pays a lot for a small slice of a company, everybody does the math as if the whole company is worth that same price. One slice, priced high, makes the whole cake look gigantic. Theranos's revenue was tiny, but the slices were selling at $9 billion prices. So on paper, the 20-something founder holding half the cake was a billionaire. And the slices kept selling for one reason: the story. So what did the box actually do? The Edison was supposed to run a full menu of tests on a few drops of blood. Outside scientists kept asking a simple question: David Agus, an oncologist, said, blood clots, and in very small fluid systems, it clogs. She wouldn't give me an answer of why that wasn't a problem for her, he said. To me, that was the initial red flag. In February 2015, Stanford professor John Ioannidis wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association that Theranos had published no peer-reviewed research. None. For a company asking the world to trust its blood tests, that was a remarkable gap. Here is what the later lawsuits and the trial laid out. Most of the tests at the Walgreens centers were not run on Edisons. They were run on commercially available machines made by other companies, some of them modified to handle tiny samples. The Securities and Exchange Commission later charged that Theranos claimed its technology was used by the Department of Defense in combat situations, which which was false. It said the company projected more than $100 million in revenue for 2014. Actual revenue that year, according to the SEC, was about $100,000. There was the Pfizer report. A 2010 document titled as a Pfizer and Theranos Validation Report shown to Walgreens and to investors, carrying the Pfizer logo. Pfizer had not written it. At trial, a Pfizer scientist testified that Pfizer had come to the opposite conclusion. Holmes testified that Theranos had done work with Pfizer, that she added the logo herself, and that she wished she had handled it differently. And when Vice President Joe Biden toured the company in 2015, Carreyrou reported that Holmes and Balwani had a showcase lab set up for the visit to hide how the real lab was running. The person who finally pulls the thread is a reporter, John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal. Gets a tip from a medical expert who thinks the Edison looks suspicious. He starts calling former employees quietly for months. One of his key sources is a young man named Tyler Schultz. He worked at Theranos from 2013 to 2014. He is the grandson of George Schultz, the board member. Tyler raised his concerns inside the company and got nowhere. He then reported the lab to New York State health regulators under a false name. And he talked to Kariru. One family, split down the middle. A grandfather who believes in the founder. A grandson who believes she is hurting patients. When Theranos learns what Kariru is working on, it fights. Holmes's lawyer is David Boies, one of the most famous litigators in the country. Lawyers go after the sources, including Tyler, with legal threats over trade secrets. The Journal is threatened too. The journal publishes anyway. October 2015. And that is how we get back to the studio, the hot lights, and Jim Kramer saying the article was pretty brutal. Holmes denies everything. She calls the journal a tabloid. The company says the story is factually and scientifically erroneous and promises to publish data proving its tests work. First, they think you're crazy. Then they fight you. But the regulators are already moving. In January 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sends Theranos a letter after inspecting its lab in Newark, California. It says conditions there pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety. One of the problems is a test used to set the dose of the blood thinner warfarin. On the Today Show, Holmes says she is devastated that the company did not catch and fix the issues faster. Then come the numbers that cannot be spun. In May 2016, Theranos voids 2 full years of results from its Edison devices. Tens of thousands of test results corrected or thrown out. In June, Forbes recalculates. Theranos might be worth about $800 million, and because her shares sit behind the investors' preferred stock, her stake is worth essentially nothing. From $4.5 billion to zero in one year. In July, regulators ban her from owning or operating a blood testing lab for 2 years. Walgreens walks away and later sues. Sunny Balwani leaves the company. Holmes has said she fired him. He has said he left on his own. Arizona finds Theranos sold about 1.5 million blood tests to its residents. The company agrees to refund every one of them. $4.65 million in all. In October, Theranos lays off 340 people. In January, another 155. In March 2018, the SEC charges Holmes, Balwani, and Theranos with what it calls an elaborate, years-long fraud that raised more than $700 million. Holmes settles without admitting or denying the charges. A $500,000 penalty. Nearly 19 million shares handed back. Her voting control gone. A 10-year ban from running a public company. 3 months later, in June 2018, a federal grand jury indicts her and Balwani for wire fraud. By September, Theranos announces it is dissolving. The investors' money is gone. Reporting put the losses for its private backers at more than $600 million. The trial is delayed by the pandemic. And by her pregnancy. In July 2021, she gives birth to a son. Her partner now is Billy Evans, a young heir to a San Diego hotel family whom she met in 2017. On August 31st, 2021, the trial opens in San Jose before Judge Edward Davila. The prosecution's case is the paper trail, faked demonstrations, Validation reports that weren't what they claimed. Contracts overstated. Revenue overstated. Test results that patients had relied on. Then Holmes does something many defendants never do. She takes the stand. For 7 days. Her story is different. She says she believed in the technology. She says her scientists and lab directors misled her. That she relied on the people around her. And she says something far darker about Sunny Balwani. She testifies that he was controlling, that he berated her, that he sexually abused her during their relationship. She says he wanted to, in her words, kill the person she was and create a new Elizabeth. Balwani has categorically denied those allegations, calling them false and inflammatory. And on the central point, Holmes made a striking admission. She testified that Balwani had not forced her to make the statements to investors, partners, and journalists that were at the heart of the case. Those, she said, were hers. In one text message to her shown at trial, Balwani wrote, I am responsible for everything at Theranos. All have been my decisions too. On January 3rd, 2022, the jury comes back. Guilty on 4 counts of defrauding investors. Not guilty on the 4 counts of defrauding patients. No verdict on 3 others, later dropped. Balwani is tried separately that spring. He is convicted on all 12 counts and later sentenced to 12 years and 11 months. November 18th, 2022. Sentencing day. She is pregnant with her second child. She speaks to the court, and she cries. I loved Theranos, she says. It was my life's work. And then, I am devastated by my failings. Judge Davila calls the case troubling on so many levels. He describes an exciting venture that went forward with great expectations, only to be dashed by untruths, misrepresentations, plain hubris, and lies. Prosecutors had asked for 15 years. Her lawyers had asked for 18 months. He gives her 11 years and 3 months. She and Bawani are ordered to pay $452 million in restitution to the victims. Prosecutors argue her second pregnancy was a strategy to delay prison. She denies it. She says she simply wanted to grow her family. In May 2023, A few weeks before prison, she gives her first interview in seven years to Amy Chozik of the New York Times. She wants to be called Liz now. She talks about her children, about volunteering, about new inventions she is still sketching out, and she says, "I made so many mistakes." It is in those same weeks that the cameras of You Can See Everything are rolling in the beach house. What the film shows. Is not a confession. According to the film and its reviews, Holmes tells the filmmakers she never set out to mislead anyone. She and Evans talk about a second chapter for her work and reach out to possible investors. Fielder shows them scenes from The Dropout, the Hulu series in which Amanda Seyfried won an Emmy playing her. Holmes gets upset and asks to stop watching. Shortly before she leaves, she has her body 3D scanned. Worried her likeness could be misused. On May 30th, 2023, she reports to Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a minimum-security camp in Bryan, Texas. In the film, she says goodbye to Fielder before she goes in. Then the film jumps 2 years. Fielder brings in Amanda Seyfried to play Holmes again, this time in reconstructions of moments the cameras could not capture. Much of the second half turns toward Billy Evans. The deal he struck with the filmmakers, which the film says he gave up before release, And his role managing her public image while she is inside. Evans denies exploiting her and says in the film that she trusts him completely. Fielder also visits Holmes in prison, with no cameras allowed, and rebuilds the conversation with Seyfried. In that reenactment, Holmes is angry about how the Dropout betrayed her. She says she owes hundreds of millions in restitution. She cries and says she loves Evans. And at the end, the directors admit they still are not sure what they saw. Fielder said many people from her past simply did not want to take part. In his words, they were just sort of done with her. As of this episode, Elizabeth Holmes is still in federal custody in Texas. Her appeal failed. In February 2025, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed her conviction and sentence. In 2025, she gave an interview from prison saying she still intends to change the medical testing industry. In December 2025, the Los Angeles Times reported that she had begun campaigning for a presidential pardon from Donald Trump. In March 2026, Judge Davila cut her sentence by 12 months under revised sentencing guidelines. The reasons cited included her lack of prior convictions and the government's failure to prove that any investor suffered personal hardship from losing money in Theranos. That is the strongest point her side has ever won in court. And in September 2026, the Bureau of Prisons approved a transfer to a halfway house near Austin, scheduled for August 2027. Her release date, according to that letter, is February 22nd, 2030. So go back to that studio in October 2015. First, they think you're crazy. Then, they fight you. And then, all of a sudden, you change the world. She got the first two right. People did think she was crazy, from the first Stanford professor who told her it would not work. People did fight her—a reporter, a grandson, a few lab workers who would not stay quiet. The third part never came. What did come was something almost nobody in business history has pulled off: a 19-year-old dropout with no product built. Built a wall of statesmen around a box. She turned a family's lost fortune into a $9 billion story. She raised more than $700 million from the richest families in America. She did it with conviction, with a uniform, with a voice, with secrecy, and with a refusal to hear the word no. Those are the same tools the real greats use. The difference is what was inside the box. In the end, the most valuable thing Theranos ever made was her story. And even now, from a prison camp in Texas, people are still lining up to buy a ticket. A New York Times reporter says that Holmes once remarked, about The Dropout, they're not playing me, they're playing a character I created. The film notes that the reporter stands by her memory of it, though she has offered no evidence. But true or not, it is the question every version of this story keeps asking. Where does Elizabeth end, and where does the character begin? The title of the film promises you can see everything. After 20 years, a trial, a prison sentence, and 3 hours of footage, nobody has.