The documentary You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, follows Elizabeth Holmes’ final weeks before reporting to prison and has become one of the highest-grossing documentaries. Rather than casting Holmes strictly as a mastermind or a victim, the film emphasizes her ability to generate sympathy even from people who know about her crimes.
Tyler Shultz — who took his first job after college at Theranos and later helped expose the company’s dangerously inaccurate blood-testing devices — says the film did not change his view of Holmes. Theranos reached an approximate peak valuation of $10 billion despite its core technology never reliably working: the company used its own machines for only a fraction of tests and relied on third‑party equipment for the rest.
Theranos’ failures combined scientific, regulatory and investor shortcomings. Much of the company’s financing came from individual backers such as the DeVos and Walton families rather than from venture capital firms. Theranos routinely declined to share scientific data or evidence that its devices worked with prospective investors, citing trade‑secret concerns, which deterred many top Silicon Valley venture capitalists.
Although Holmes’ legal case is closed and she is serving a federal sentence of more than eleven years, media and public attention to the story has persisted. In an interview with The San Francisco Standard, Shultz said, “the only reason we’re talking about Elizabeth Holmes right now is because she wants us to be talking about Elizabeth Holmes right now.” The documentary suggests Holmes is cultivating pity — a response that could serve her future plans better than public scorn.
Shultz says the Theranos cautionary tale has renewed relevance in the current AI era. He warns that performing due diligence on AI is particularly difficult: it can be hard to distinguish genuinely novel technology from repackaged uses of existing models such as a ChatGPT wrapper. “If you want to deceive people, I think this is a great opportunity to go deceive people,” he said.
He also warned about the magnitude of early financing and the power it hands entrepreneurs. Shultz noted that Holmes scaled an angel-investor model into massive rounds — and that when investors hand large sums to founders without subjecting the technology to rigorous, independent review, the potential for abuse increases.
The film also shows Holmes and her partner, hotel heir Billy Evans, working on a new diagnostics company called Haemanthus, which has reportedly raised about $20 million. Shultz said he feels uneasy about what might come next: Holmes appears to be preparing a “second act,” and in the context of AI’s rapid capital inflows, he fears investors may forget the lessons of Theranos.
In sum, the Theranos saga underlines the importance of demonstrable evidence and transparency behind technological claims. Shultz’s warning is that the combination of fast-moving AI hype, large sums of early capital and the difficulty of technical due diligence creates an environment where deception could be easier to carry out if investors do not insist on verifiable proof and independent examination.
