They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. That may be true for everyone but Elizabeth Holmes, who reintroduced herself this weekend in a preview for a new documentary from Nathan Fielder, called “You Can See Everything.” The teaser features 45 seconds of the Theranos founder in tight focus, her eyes as big as Jupiter, where she assures Fielder: “I’m always being real.” This brief interaction is so unnerving and so reminiscent of a horror film that even with scant details, the documentary is already the talk of tech town.
“You Can See Everything” debuted in a secret screening on Sunday at the Telluride Film Festival, and will be released theatrically in October. It was filmed in 2023, in the weeks before Holmes went to prison for defrauding the investors of her infamous startup. Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, seem to have granted an unusual degree of access to the documentary crew during this vulnerable time, inviting Fielder to move into their home and letting them film everything (including, reportedly, Evans stark nude in the shower). At Telluride, Fielder told audiences he was still “struggling to this day to understand what I experienced.” Fielder has made his career obscuring the line between reality and fiction. Holmes, arguably, has done the same. A documentary that features the two of them wrestling for control of the truth is a level of surrealism Silicon Valley has never seen before and Hollywood hasn’t seen since perhaps Orson Welles’ “F for Fake.”
Fielder’s documentary is years in the making, but so is the version of Holmes that appears in it. For the past year, Holmes has been workshopping this new character on X.com, where she has become a prolific contributor, sometimes posting upwards of 20 times a day. Nobody knew exactly how this was happening. She is an inmate at Bryan Federal Prison Camp, a minimum-security prison in Texas, where inmates do not have access to the internet aside from TRULINCS, a text-only email system. Now, we know that the ventriloquist behind the account is almost certainly Evans, who has also spent the past year fundraising for a stealth blood diagnostics startup —basically, Theranos 2.0.
The tweets depict a very different person from the one who appeared at Holmes’ trial: a woman who was deeply neurotic and obsessed with public perception, who wrote Patrick Bateman-style notes to herself with bizarre mantras, who copied Steve Jobs’ uniform and deliberately altered the sound of her voice, and who exchanged cringey text messages with her cofounder-slash-lover Sunny Balwani. (Recall this famous bit of poetry: “You are breeze in desert for me / My water / And ocean / Meant to be only together tiger,” to which Balwani replied: “OK.”) If people felt schadenfreude watching her downfall, it was at least partly because Elizabeth Holmes had become a character — one so absurd, and so made-for-TV, that it has since become hard to separate the real person from the fictional one portrayed by Amanda Seyfried in “The Dropout.” Of those portrayals, Holmes has said: “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” Now, with her husband in charge, a new character has emerged.
Who is the new Elizabeth Holmes? The tweets are an erratic mix of politics, hot takes (“most [venture capitalists] are spineless, cogs of a mimetic invention machine”), workout routines, opinions on the healthcare industry, lucid dreaming, dietary advice, prison reform, praise of the religious right, and zingy replies to her opps. Many of the posts have a pseudo-philosophical leaning to them (“Why is fear your master?”); others are extremely funny (“Locked in. Literally and figuratively”). She is deft at farming engagement, and has picked fights with Jason Calacanis and Milo Yiannopoulos, who recently spoke about his experience spending 24 hours in ICE custody. (Yiannopoulos: “I was weeping like an old woman for an hour.” Holmes: “I’ve lived in that darkness for 1,190 days / It didn’t break me / It made me invincible / We aren’t the same.”) She regularly replies to Bryan Johnson, the longevity guru who has crafted his own type of persona online, and once asked him to design a prison-suitable nutrition protocol for her. He replied enthusiastically, in a way that felt like a carefully constructed crossover episode of two popular TV shows. She also posted the teaser to the Fielder documentary, of course captioning it “I’m always being real.”
Knowing that Holmes’ husband is the likely author of these tweets makes the tweets about her husband extra weird.
Mostly, Holmes tweets about her family — especially her two young children — and the grief she feels about being separated from them: “I am screaming inside to get back to my babies, to hold them in my arms and heal them when they’re sick. And I’m not going to stop until I am home.” Knowing that Evans is the likely author of these tweets makes some of them extra weird: “There is no sleep here like the sleep after being with my love. I am not here in that sleep. I am home. am in his arms. I am complete.”
This character — like the one trying to convince Fielder of her sincerity in “You Can See Everything” — is supposed to be one the public can sympathize with. She is a martyr and a mother, a victim looking for vindication. She repeatedly insists on her innocence, reframing the Theranos debacle as a big misunderstanding. Engaging with people on X.com, and participating in a tell-all documentary, is part of a broader effort to rehabilitate her image, or at least muddle the narrative.
It’s not totally clear why Holmes and Evans would have agreed to let a documentary crew be part of this effort. Even Fielder seems confused about their motivations, telling the audience at Telluride: “I don’t know why they wanted me there. Why am I there?” Based on the reactions to the documentary trailer, any attempt at a redemption arc appears to have backfired spectacularly. The person who appears in the film almost seems like an actor doing an exaggerated satire of Elizabeth Holmes, one who is even creepier and more calculated than the previous version. Then again, maybe perception is besides the point. She has once again captured the world’s attention, and we will all be waiting to see what she does next.
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