Elizabeth Holmes Was Ahead of Her Time
· The Atlantic
Perhaps Elizabeth Holmes was simply ahead of her time: Today, the Theranos founder’s crimes look less notorious amid a pervasive culture of grift and graft.
Her biotechnology company infamously promised to revolutionize medicine by conducting hundreds of tests on mere pinpricks of blood. A decade after it fell into disgrace, and three years after she began serving her 11-year federal-prison sentence for defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, Holmes is the subject of a new documentary. You Can See Everything, directed by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, came about because Holmes and her partner, the hotel heir Billy Evans, invited Fielder, a surrealist sketch comedian, to live with them just before she went to prison. They allowed him to film whatever he saw. The result is unsettling, because Holmes’s placid indifference toward the truth has become more familiar than it was when Theranos unraveled.
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Holmes, who insists that she wants to be transparent with Fielder, implacably maintains that she did nothing wrong and that Theranos was capable of meeting its promise of technological breakthroughs. In reality, the company never had a device that could deliver the promised number of tests on tiny blood samples; its machine could run only a handful of basic tests, sometimes inaccurately, and had to secretly rely on conventional analyzers. Yet the film shows that even in the dwindling days before her sentence began, she and Evans were talking about creating Theranos 2.0. (Evans’s new company, unlike Theranos, involves lasers.)
[Read: Manipulator vs. manipulator]
Fielder, who previously played a cringingly anti-social business consultant in his show Nathan for You and a man who obsessively practices for difficult social interactions in The Rehearsal, is known for inhabiting an absurd persona for awkwardly long periods of time. He seems shaken from his encounter with someone capable of doing so for longer. Holmes is one of those people so entangled with the avatars and projections they create—a woman who maintains, despite her conviction on fraud charges, that she has never lied in her life—that the authentic self cannot be found. Fielder earnestly attempts to learn the truth, but is never able to do so satisfactorily.
To a moviegoer, the effect is exhilarating—like encountering the nested realities of Christopher Nolan’s Inception or the superposition of documentary and fiction in Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (about the real-life case of a downtrodden Iranian cinephile on trial for impersonating a famous movie director). To a writer who covers American politics, Holmes’s hall of mirrors is uncomfortably familiar. Politics is dominated more by avatars and projections than by authentic actors. You empathize with Fielder’s agony: a maddening drive to get to the truth, a shared skepticism that he will ever get there, the sneaking suspicion that people might not care even if he did.
Another nihilistic thought gnaws at me: Would a Theranos-style implosion be as newsworthy today? Americans love an Icarus story, and Holmes fell from quite a height: She was, for a time, the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. Theranos’s ascent was made possible by the imprimatur of what one reporter called “the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history”—with former and future Cabinet members such as Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Mattis. Prominent billionaires—Rupert Murdoch, Carlos Slim, the Walton family, Betsy DeVos—invested huge sums of money in the company. She demonstrated that even people advising the president or running some of the world’s most powerful companies were painfully easy to dupe. “I only have myself to blame for not asking a lot more questions,” Murdoch later told The Wall Street Journal. (His family owns the newspaper, whose investigation into Theranos began the start-up’s demise.) “One of a bunch of old men taken in by a seemingly great young woman! Total embarrassment.”
The rise and fall of Theranos happened at a time of great optimism for Silicon Valley, under a president who promised hope and change. Back in the mid-2010s, you could more easily believe that technological disruption was not just making Americans rich but also connecting humanity, freeing expression, and enabling democracy. Conventional wisdom had not yet concluded that social media atomized people and made them anxious, or that tech titans, who sounded so libertarian then, were ultimately businessmen above all else. Cryptocurrency was only beginning to attract its own raft of charlatans and criminals.
A decade ago, the association of the highest echelons of the power elite with an ultimately fraudulent business was a scandal. Today, it might seem mundane. Donald Trump has unashamedly profited from the presidency, earning more than $1.4 billion in 2025 from cryptocurrency deals. The Trump family has received significant money coming from countries that wish to bend the president’s ear on foreign policy. Donald Trump Jr. has benefited from the sudden interest in his business acumen. Months after the younger Trump’s venture-capital firm took an ownership stake in a rare-earth-magnet start-up, it was awarded a $620 million government loan. (Despite this run of self-made luck, part of his wedding celebration was paid for by a Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch.) The Republican operatives who were supposed to be busy running advertising for the midterm elections—James Blair and Chris LaCivita—were instead found to be playing hooky in the Balkans, where they have been moonlighting as advisers for the self-governing ethnic-Serbian section of Bosnia and Herzegovina. You seldom hear the phrase drain the swamp anymore.
[Tom Nichols: Kimberly Guilfoyle broke Trump’s most important rule]
Amid this spectacle of self-dealing at the center of American political life, what kind of fraud still has the capacity to shock? Consider the implosion of Nikola Corporation, an electric-vehicle company once valued at $30 billion, triple Theranos’s peak valuation. A 2018 video purporting to show a truck being powered by a hydrogen fuel cell turned out two years later to just be a showcase of gravity: The truck was rolling downhill. Trevor Milton, the CEO, was convicted of securities fraud in 2022. Trump pardoned him in March 2025, after Milton and his wife had—unrelatedly, Milton said—donated more than $3 million to Trump and his allies. Though arguably more sordid than the Theranos affair, this episode garnered only a fraction of the attention. The president has an unmistakable affection for fraudsters. Since he returned to office, Trump has pardoned nearly 50 people convicted of financial crimes.
Holmes would very much like to join their ranks. Last year she applied for clemency, and some in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement are rehabilitating her into a martyr. Jessica Reed Kraus, a famous MAHA influencer, explained Holmes’s downfall by saying that she posed a “catastrophic threat to a trillion-dollar industry controlled by conglomerates.” Her crime was not being too deceitful, but being too visionary. “My crew joked that if Holmes emerged today, she would be counted among the innovators MAHA endorses,” Kraus wrote.
If Holmes had peaked during the Trump era, and had sought the right political protection, perhaps she could have escaped prosecution altogether. The number of federal prosecutions of white-collar crimes in 2025 hit a 39-year low. Amid all the chicanery of the second Trump administration, another Holmes-level deception is easy to imagine. It just wouldn’t register as anything remarkable.