David Agus’s first encounter with Elizabeth Holmes at a health conference came as a shock. The Holmes he met in the green room was personable and pleasant. The Holmes he interviewed on stage was altogether different.
That transition from the green room to the stage – I had never experienced something like that before.” Holmes is not like you or me. She was still a teenager when she founded Theranos, touting technology capable of performing medical tests using only a few drops of blood. She cultivated a distinctive persona: blond hair, an unblinking gaze, a husky voice and a black turtleneck worn in homage to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
Holmes mesmerised 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’s shining career ended in disgrace and imprisonment. 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, says: “You can’t make this stuff up. If some screenwriter had tried to manufacture this out of whole cloth people would be like, no, this is an unbelievable story.
Who’s the real Elizabeth Holmes? That’s a question that still hasn’t been answered.” Perhaps the answer lies in You Can See Everything, a reality-bending documentary, released in the US on Friday, in which Holmes goes eyeball-to-eyeball with the absurdist comedian Nathan Fielder, who directs along with Lance Oppenheim. It was filmed in the 34 days before she was due to report to federal prison camp Bryan in Texas to begin her 11-year sentence for wire fraud and conspiracy.
That fate seemed unthinkable in 2003 when, at the age of 19, Holmes dropped out of Stanford University and established Theranos, promising to revolutionise the multibillion-dollar blood-testing industry by using microfluidics to run hundreds of tests on just a few drops of blood. She found a receptive audience among investors who wanted Silicon Valley to deliver more than Facebook friends. O’Mara explains: “She stands out in her ascent as a female entrepreneur at a time when men were dominating the scene and she was doing something that was in tech but seemed to be change-the-world-tech.
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