'You Can See Everything’: An honest look at the lies that built tech empires

Elizabeth Holmes, the famously eccentric billionaire now serving an 11-year prison sentence for fraud, is fascinating less because of her crimes than because of the mystery surrounding her perception of them. Scams in health companies are a dime a dozen, and Holmes' Theranos is notable only because it targeted many of the rich and powerful. Yet Holmes stands out for another reason: She doggedly insists that she is wrongly accused.

In "You Can See Everything," a documentary co-directed by and starring Nathan Fielder as he receives unfettered access to Holmes shortly before she goes to prison, does not illuminate the mystery behind Holmes. At the end, she stands as staunchly as ever by not only her self-proclaimed innocence, but by other questionable aspects of her past — and, for that matter, her current life choices. Instead "You Can See Everything" is intriguing precisely because it never reveals anything about Holmes. It simply shows her as she is, and then gives the viewer enough distance from the subject to encourage them to reach their own conclusions.

But that is not all it does. Part-way through the film, Holmes begins her prison sentence, but the story is far from over. Her husband Billy Evans makes a long-foreshadowed heel turn, exercising controlling behavior over Holmes and causing Fielder and actress Amanda Seyfried, who plays Holmes in the mini-series "The Dropout," to accuse Evans of exploiting her. Like its analysis of Holmes' self-honesty, "You Can See Everything" never resolves the questions about the Holmes-Evans relationship. It merely observes from a distance, or with Seyfried cleverly and uncannily reprising her role as Holmes.

The most important theme of "You Can See Everything" is that objective reality is never particularly important to the people with the most power. They occupy a world in which merely believing something to be true often seems to literally make that things true. When we see Holmes display these delusional traits in the lead-up to her prison sentence, it becomes easy to see how she could create a multibillion dollar company based on a promise — that it could run comprehensive blood tests with just a few drops of blood — that she never had the ability to deliver on.

Because people like Holmes continue to exert power over our lives, "You Can See Everything" winds up being about a lot more than one particular scammer. Holmes embodies the sense of entitlement and willful delusions of that class of humanity that can create mega-corporations based on hype. We see it in AI CEOs who continue to develop a technology that they plausibly believe could destroy humanity, or at least create an uninhabitable economy. We see it also in the MAHA movement, which perhaps not surprisingly has embraced Holmes' victim narrative. As Kathryn Olivarius, a historian at Stanford University writing a book on the MAHA movement, told Politico last year that "she’s such a perfect martyr for this. It feels almost inevitable that this would happen.There’s something in her story for everyone in this movement… You can always frame it so that you know she’s somehow being victimized here.”

Before reporters at The Wall Street Journal and federal investigators exposed her, Holmes had caused massive unnecessary suffering. Theranos falsely reported miscarriages, recommended blood-thinners for a patient who ddi not need them and diagnosed patients incorrectly with deadly ailments like prostate cancer and heart attacks. While the scope of Theranos' crimes will likely never be known, Arizona found that roughly 10 percent of its blood test results had to be corrected or voided from 2013 to 2016. Holmes also squashed dissenters and whistleblowers and harmed businesses like Walgreens and Safeway that trusted her. Holmes and her business partner Sunny Balwani were later ordered to pay roughly $452 million in restitution jointly or separately, of which almost $398 million went to losses from 12 Theranos investors.

There were harsh real-world consequences for Holmes' delusions, and "You Can See Everything" to its credit never loses sight of that. Quite to the contrary, it tries almost desperately to get Holmes to accept accountability, to show sincere empathy in any meaningful way to her victims. The task is doomed to failure, though — even Fielder seems painfully aware of that — and this movie tells the story of the entertaining way it is unable to get a scammer to see straight.