A Theranos whistleblower who helped expose the collapse of the $9 billion biotech company says Elizabeth Holmes appears “almost unrecognizable” in a new documentary about the disgraced founder.
You Can See Everything gives viewers an unusually close look at Holmes during the final days she spent at home before reporting to prison to begin an 11-year sentence tied to the downfall of her blood-testing company, Theranos.
Tyler Shultz, who worked as a Theranos intern in 2013, later helped a Wall Street Journal investigation reveal that the technology the company marketed did not work as promised.
After viewing the highly anticipated documentary, Shultz said he was “pretty shocked” by Holmes’s portrayal. He told reporters that the woman onscreen did “not at all” resemble the powerful executive he remembered.
“The Elizabeth that I knew completely commanded a room, even if that room was full of secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, generals, senators. She would own a room,” Shultz told CBS.
Shultz’s connection to Theranos was also personal: his grandfather, former US Secretary of State George Shultz, served on the company’s board.
“She had so much confidence, and the woman that I saw onscreen looked, frankly, like a broken woman,” the whistleblower said. “It was almost unrecognizable.”
Former Theranos employee and whistleblower Tyler Shultz said he was “pretty shocked” by his former boss’s appearance in the documentary
Elizabeth Holmes, the 42-year-old founder and former CEO of Theranos, allowed a film crew into her home 34 days before reporting to prison
Shultz said Holmes once projected immense confidence, while the woman he saw onscreen appeared “like a broken woman” and was “almost unrecognizable”
Shultz also accused Holmes of misleading the documentary’s filmmakers by showing them a different blood-testing device from the one he had worked with for 12 hours a day.
“She brings out the Theranos device, and she lays it across the table and all of its components, so you know you can see everything,” Shultz said. But he argued that the equipment displayed on camera “was not the device that we hid from regulators.”
DISCOVER MORE: Ilhan Omar Defies Intimidation as She Appeals for Donations
“That was not the device that failed quality controls. That was not the device that we used to knowingly give patients incorrect medical information,” he added, saying Holmes led filmmaker Nathan Fielder “down this completely different rabbit hole.”
Fielder moved into Holmes’s home and filmed her for 34 days as she prepared to begin her 11-year prison term.
Holmes was convicted in 2022 on four counts of fraud and conspiracy related to investors in Theranos.
She and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, her former Theranos executive and ex-boyfriend, were also ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution.
Holmes’s sentence has since been reduced. In March, a federal judge cut 12 months from the term after changes to federal sentencing guidelines affecting certain first-time, nonviolent offenders.
Elizabeth Holmes is scheduled to transfer to a Texas halfway house next August
Holmes has also pursued an earlier release from prison, including by asking President Donald Trump for clemency.
The former Theranos chief has returned to the spotlight through the film, which became the second-highest-grossing documentary at the box office during its opening weekend after being released on October 16.
In the film, Holmes’s husband Billy Evans admits he was worried that his fraudster wife could be scamming him.
Holmes is set to leave federal prison next August and move into a Texas halfway house after she has reportedly been approved for transfer from the minimum-security federal prison where she has been locked up since May 2023 to a community correction center near Austin.
Instead of remaining at Federal Prison Camp Bryan, Holmes would serve the final stretch of her sentence in a supervised facility designed to help federal inmates transition back into everyday life.
The Austin Transitional Center is a privately operated, 460-bed community corrections facility about seven miles southeast of downtown Austin.
