Elizabeth Holmes is back on the silver screen, and the tech world has has thoughts.
Holmes, the disgraced Theranos founder, is the subject of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s new documentary, “You Can See Everything.”
Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors after her blood-testing startup falsely claimed it could run hundreds of diagnostic tests from a small amount of blood. She has consistently denied wrongdoing.
Since the film’s theatrical release on Friday (it grossed an impressive $15 million in its opening weekend), people who work in and around tech have been sharing their reactions.
And don’t worry if you haven’t seen the film yet: We’re keeping it spoiler-free.
Holmes’ legacy
Audiences can’t pin down how they feel about the film’s central characters.
John Loeber, a San Francisco-based investor and the former CEO of Limit, said the film brought him back to a 2019 party when he ran into Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans.
“Double take. She’s not in jail?” he wrote Saturday on X about the encounter. Seeing them on screen was equally “uncanny.”
“I have never before seen a movie where I have personally met the leading cast. And I was not prepared for the level of surprise and weirdness in seeing their faces — especially Billy, whom I had not thought about in seven years — on the big screen,” he wrote.
Nick White, a former software engineer turned YouTube and Kick streamer, said the film reminded him of “why I left the tech industry.”
“There are so many narcissistic, delusional morons in that industry who genuinely believe they’re geniuses,” he wrote on X.
Last week, ahead of the doc’s release, a tech crowd got a sneak peek of the doc at a Manhattan movie theatre rented out by AI startup Extend — Business Insider reporter Henry Chandonnet was there.
That audience couldn’t settle on what to make of Holmes, either. Some said she had become a meme. Others called her an utter psychopath, while one attendee said the film had unexpectedly made Holmes seem sympathetic.
Mostly ‘great,’ a few ‘boring’
There’s a range of feelings about the film itself.
Songwriter Grimes — whose own artistic career has circled Silicon Valley — called the film “innovative” and called the movie’s second half “artistic futurism.”
The pseudonymous X user roon, who runs a well-followed techno-optimist Substack from Silicon Valley, called Fielder’s filmmaking talent “almost incomprehensible” — but said he was wasting it on “some quite boring subject matter.”
John Carreyrou, the former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter whose investigation helped expose Theranos, disagrees. He called it “a great film.”
Carreyrou also wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, published on Sunday, about his jealousy around the Fielder and Oppenheim’s access to Holmes — and his own worries about personal safety.
But the film, he wrote, is the “#BestPicture,” he wrote on X, referencing its early Oscar buzz.
