Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder who still swears the machine worked

Elizabeth Holmes

Photo: Glenn Fawcett / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 3, 1984 Washington, D.C.
Occupation	Business Executive
Awards	Horatio Alger Award

About halfway through You Can See Everything, Elizabeth Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, open a storage unit, pull out the hardware of a company that no longer exists and lay it out at home so that a deadpan Canadian comedian can see it for himself. The company was Theranos. A federal jury had already decided what those machines could and could not do, and had convicted Holmes of lying about them to the people who paid for them. She has never accepted that verdict. The film Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim shot inside her house before she went to prison is the fullest record yet of a founder who still believes the story she sold, and who has now offered a camera the one thing her investors never got: complete access.

The certainty was there from the start. Holmes grew up in a family that liked to remember it had once owned the Fleischmann’s Yeast fortune; her father worked at an Enron subsidiary. Born in Washington, she finished high school at St. John’s School in Houston and went to Stanford to study chemical engineering.

After her first year, in 2003, she spent a summer at the Genome Institute of Singapore, collecting blood with syringes to test for SARS. The idea she brought back, and has never let go of, was a fingerprick instead of a needle and a small machine that could run hundreds of tests on a few drops. Phyllis Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford, told her it would not work. Channing Robertson, her engineering dean, backed her instead and became her first board member. That year, at 19, she founded Real-Time Cures, soon renamed Theranos. In March 2004, a month after turning 20, she left Stanford and put her tuition money into the company.

What followed was a decade in which belief did most of the work. Theranos ran in stealth, with no press releases and no website, until a partnership with Walgreens was announced in September 2013. By then George Shultz had joined the board and helped recruit Henry Kissinger and Jim Mattis; Rupert Murdoch and the Walton family put money in. In 2014 Theranos was valued at nine billion dollars, and Forbes ranked Holmes the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. She wore black turtlenecks in deliberate tribute to Steve Jobs and spoke in a deep baritone that, she confirmed to The New York Times in 2023, was not her natural voice.

The collapse began in a newsroom. In October 2015 John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal reported that the company’s Edison device produced unreliable results and that most of its tests ran on commercial analyzers made by other manufacturers. That evening she told CNBC’s Jim Cramer: “First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world.” Within a year Walgreens had closed its Theranos centers and Forbes had revised her net worth to zero. In 2018 she settled fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission and accepted a ten-year ban from running a public company. A federal grand jury indicted her that June, and by September Theranos was dissolving.

The trial, before Judge Edward Davila, opened at the end of August 2021. Holmes testified for seven days, said staff had misled her about the technology and described years of abuse by Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the former Theranos president and her secret partner of more than a decade; he denied the allegations. In January 2022 the jury convicted her on four counts of defrauding investors and acquitted her on the counts concerning patients. That November she was sentenced to 135 months, and she and Balwani were ordered to pay 452 million dollars in restitution. She reported to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, on May 30, 2023. The Ninth Circuit upheld the conviction in February 2025.

The acquittal on the patient counts is the thread her defenders keep pulling, and it is a thin one: Theranos had already settled a lawsuit by the State of Arizona by agreeing to refund the cost of 1.5 million blood tests sold to its residents. The harder contradiction sits in her own words. Before the new documentary there was already a shelf of Holmes stories, from Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood and Alex Gibney‘s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley to Hulu‘s The Dropout, which won Amanda Seyfried an Emmy for playing her. Fielder plays her the series; reacting to the way she has been portrayed, Holmes says: “they’re not playing me, they’re playing a character I created.” It is meant as a correction. It reads as an admission that the turtleneck, the voice and the founder on the magazine covers were a construction, which is roughly what prosecutors said about the company. Alan Eisenman, who put about 1.2 million dollars into Theranos and says he has received nothing in restitution, told NBC News in September that “she’s obviously manipulative.”

Evans, an heir to a San Diego hotel group, met Holmes in 2017. They have a son, born in 2021, and a daughter, born in early 2023, shortly before she went to prison. That year Evans also began raising money for a blood-testing start-up called Haemanthus, which says Holmes has no involvement in it.

From prison, the campaign has continued. A commutation request filed with the Justice Department in 2025 was still pending at the start of this year. In March 2026 Davila cut the sentence to 123 months, finding that no investor had suffered substantial financial hardship. On September 28 she posted on X, in a message signed with her initials: “I was silenced for a long time. And then imprisoned. I am fighting to prove my innocence and come home to my babies and the love of my life.” Days earlier the Bureau of Prisons had approved her transfer to the Austin Transitional Center, a halfway house in Del Valle, Texas, on August 23, 2027, with release scheduled for February 22, 2030.

You Can See Everything premiered as a secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival on September 6, with phones sealed in bags at the door, and reached American theaters on October 16, opening second behind Street Fighter. “I don’t know why they wanted me there,” Fielder told the Telluride audience. “Why am I there?”

The next fixed date is the move to Austin in August 2027. Until then the only Elizabeth Holmes most people can see is the one on screen, insisting that the machines in the storage unit worked, and the question the film leaves with its audience is the one her investors once failed to ask: whether anyone checked.

Tags: business, ceos, business leaders, Nathan Fielder, Amanda Seyfried, Elizabeth Holmes, Lance Oppenheim, You Can See Everything, The Dropout, Theranos

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