Jonathan Millar 
Anil Krishna 
James Oconner 
Why Is Elizabeth Holmes in Prison? The True Story Behind ‘You Can See Everything’
© A24
Elizabeth Holmes’ fall from celebrated Silicon Valley founder to federal inmate is still one of the strangest and most talked-about business scandals of the past decade. At one point, she was being described as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, with Theranos valued at around $9 billion and Holmes herself compared to Steve Jobs. Then, pretty much all of it came crashing down.
Now Holmes is back in the spotlight thanks to a rather unexpected documentary. At the Telluride Film Festival, directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim secretly screened You Can See Everything, an A24 film that follows Holmes during the tense weeks before she reported to prison and continues across three years of footage. It is a pretty unusual level of access to someone whose story has already been told from just about every angle, which is probably why there is renewed interest in what actually happened at Theranos in the first place.
The Promise: A Medical Breakthrough That Never Existed
Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford at 19, pitching the company as something that could completely change the way blood testing worked. The big promise was that Theranos’ supposedly revolutionary machine, called the Edison, could run hundreds of medical tests using only a few drops of blood from a finger prick. It sounded almost too good to be true, and eventually, that turned out to be the problem.
Investors bought into the idea in a big way. Theranos reached a valuation of roughly $9 billion, while Holmes attracted a surprisingly powerful group of investors and board members. Her image as a young, fearless tech founder only made the story more compelling, and comparisons to Steve Jobs became part of the Theranos mythology. For a while, it looked like Holmes had managed to pull off the kind of Silicon Valley success story people love telling.
The Downfall: How Theranos Was Exposed
That story started falling apart in 2015, when investigative reporting revealed serious problems inside Theranos. The company’s Edison technology was not producing the kind of accurate and reliable results Holmes had promised, and the gap between what Theranos claimed it could do and what it was actually doing was enormous.
One of the biggest revelations was that Theranos was secretly using conventional laboratory machines made by other companies for most of its blood testing instead of relying on its own technology. The demonstrations shown to investors also came under scrutiny, with federal prosecutors later arguing that the company had used misleading demonstrations and exaggerated financial projections while raising hundreds of millions of dollars. What had looked like a medical revolution was starting to look very different.
The Trial, Conviction and Prison Sentence
In June 2018, Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Theranos’ former chief operating officer and Holmes’ former partner, were charged with multiple counts of fraud. The case eventually turned into a lengthy legal battle, with Holmes continuing to insist that she had not deliberately deceived people.
In January 2022, a federal jury found Holmes guilty on four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud involving investors. She was acquitted of the charges concerning individual patients. During the trial, Holmes argued that she genuinely believed in what Theranos was trying to accomplish and placed much of the blame on Balwani. He was later convicted himself and sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison.
Holmes was sentenced in November 2022 to 11 years and three months in federal prison. After her appeals were exhausted, she reported to Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas in May 2023. That is where she remains incarcerated.
What’s New: You Can See Everything
And yet, somehow, the Elizabeth Holmes story still has not gone away. You Can See Everything is giving people another reason to look back at the woman behind Theranos, this time with cameras following her much closer to the point where her life was about to change dramatically.
Filming began just 34 days before Holmes reported to prison, after she invited a documentary crew to record her final days of freedom. That alone makes the film fairly unusual. Instead of reconstructing the Theranos story years later through interviews and archival footage, the directors were actually there while Holmes was preparing to enter prison.
The documentary was co-directed by Nathan Fielder, known for The Rehearsal, and documentarian Lance Oppenheim, whose previous work includes Some Kind of Heaven. The finished film runs for 174 minutes and draws from footage collected over a three-year period. A24 is distributing the movie, which made its surprise debut at Telluride and is scheduled to receive a theatrical release on October 16, followed by a streaming window on Max.
For a story that already seemed to have a definite ending, Holmes’ life is once again becoming a subject of fascination. The Theranos collapse may have happened years ago, but apparently there is still plenty people want to know about Elizabeth Holmes once the courtroom headlines are stripped away.
About the Author
