Spoiler note: This post describes one scene from You Can See Everything. The scene comes about a third of the way into the film, it has been widely reported, and it reveals nothing about how the film ends. Tyler Shultz, the former Theranos employee who helped expose the company, wrote about the same scene in his essay for STAT.

I saw You Can See Everything this week, in a theater full of people who thought they knew how the Theranos story went. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim follow Elizabeth Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, through the weeks before she reported to federal prison in 2023.

I know the story through its record. When I joined Tranquility, I built our program that brings TimePilot to law schools and criminal justice programs, and students need a real case to learn on.

So I built a demo case from the public record of Theranos: the indictment and the SEC complaints, court filings and trial exhibits, Holmes's videotaped SEC deposition from July 2017, the press coverage of the period, and transcripts of a podcast series on the case. Several schools now use the Theranos case in our platform TimePilot to teach legal theory and to examine how to investigate and prosecute complex matters. The platform even detects behavioral cues in the multiple hours of deposition videos, a feature Nathan Fielder could surely have used in making his terrific film and viewers may wish they could use during the film.

When Holmes sat down at her kitchen table and started explaining her device, I had heard it before. Versions of it run through her deposition, her interviews and her company's technical documents. As far as I know, nobody had tested it against the whole case record. I did that the next day after watching You Can See Everything.

I think the result answers one narrow question more carefully than the dramatizations, the documentaries or the commentary from the past decade have. However, the prosecution never had to answer it, and I'll explain why below.

About a third of the way into the film, Holmes brings the device out of storage in pieces. She lays the components across her kitchen table and explains to Fielder how it was meant to work.

For anyone who knows Theranos from the news, from ABC's podcast The Dropout, or from the Hulu series of the same name, this is the first of many real shocks in the film. That audience carries one picture of what Theranos promised: a single drop of blood, tested for scores of conditions at the same time. Many of them will also remember "The Tiny Blood Test," the Theranos commercial directed by Errol Morris, which helped put that picture there. Holmes, sitting at her table, describes a different machine.

Her device takes a small sample and runs whichever test it is told to run. It connects to Theranos servers, which send the instructions for each test and receive the results. The machine worked, she says. What the company still needed were the chemistries, the assays that let each test run on a small sample, and the menu would grow as they were developed. By her account, the hundreds were the menu, and any one of them could run on a drop.

Fielder stays on the word "can" for a long time. He wants to know how she could hear her own claim so differently from everyone who repeated it. She holds her ground.

Shultz objects to the scene for another reason. He writes that the device on the table was a later model, never finished and never used on patients, and that the Edison, the device Theranos did use on patients, ran one test at a time. He's right that this is important. It is worth reading his account.

What held my attention was the explanation. If she always meant what she told Fielder, part of the story the public absorbed was a misinterpretation. The record of actual case evidence can show whether part of the Elizabeth Holmes story was a misunderstanding of reality.

"Hundreds of tests on a drop of blood" can be heard two ways.

The simultaneous reading is the one most people hold. One drop goes into the machine and results for many tests come out together. It's in the headlines and the dramatizations, and it's the version people repeat whenever the case comes up.

The platform reading is what Elizabeth gave Nathan, relatively nonchalantly in her typical manner. The device can run any test on a menu that grows as new assays are developed, and each test needs only a small sample. "Hundreds" describes the menu with chemistry to be worked out later and delivered to the device from the cloud. Several people in my local theater gave audible gasps and one viewer muttered, “oh no she didn’t,” presumably in utter disbelief that this was now her claim.

Think of the platform reading of “hundreds of tests on a drop” as a streaming service that advertises 10,000 titles. Nobody expects to watch them all at once.

People who build software talk this way all the time. A product "supports 200 integrations," and everyone in the room knows that means any of them, one or a few at a time. The simultaneous picture is easier to hold in your head, though, and the company's slogans pointed straight at it.

In a fraud case, an investigator asks three questions about a statement like this one. What did the statement mean? What did the people who heard it take it to mean? Did the speaker know they had taken it differently? I won’t spoil how the film explores these questions. The record I reviewed using TimePilot answers all three.

I put the question to TimePilot, working against the demonstration case. TimePilot sees only the evidence loaded into a case, and it cites the file and page, or the time index in a video, for every statement it uses. Every quote in this post traces back to a document in that case.

The first thing I did was define the two readings in plain language and tell TimePilot to use those labels in every answer. I also told it to keep Holmes's own words apart from what other people said about her. Press coverage, investor materials and podcasts are full of claims about what Holmes said; her own words are a smaller set, and a more reliable one.

Then five questions:

1. Every statement by Holmes about how many tests the device could run or how much blood they needed, with the date, the audience and the reading each supports.

2. Any description of the device connecting to a server or the cloud, receiving test protocols remotely, or gaining tests through new assays, and the earliest instance in her own words.

3. Everything she said in her SEC deposition about test counts, sample volume and what the device could do.

4. Every time a journalist, investor, partner or employee described the device as running many tests on one sample, and whether Holmes or Theranos corrected it.

5. The strongest case for each reading, the documents behind it, and anything the record leaves unresolved.

I kept the questions neutral. Any of them could have come back in her favor, and some did.

I also argued with it. At one point I suggested that a private message of hers proved she had always thought in platform terms. TimePilot disagreed and laid out why. Later I asked whether the prosecution might have rested on a misreading, and it took the charges one at a time. Both answers are below.

The platform Holmes described at her kitchen table existed, on paper and in the lab, years before anyone made a film about her.

Validation reports Theranos prepared for pharmaceutical partners lay out the design: instruments, single-use cartridges and a wireless link to a Theranos server. Each cartridge carries a bar code. The device reads the code, pulls the matching test protocol from the server, runs the assay and sends the data back. A September 2012 protocol for a military field trial describes results going to a "cloud" of servers that users could reach through a website, and the Walgreens contracts license software the stores could reach through the devices or a designated website. A decade later, Holmes walked Fielder through the same system.

In interviews in 2013 and 2014, she described a physician writing a rule on the lab form: if this result is out of range, run that follow-up test on the same sample. Tests come off a menu. The sample is kept for more.

Her July 2017 SEC deposition is more explicit. She called the core invention a robot that could do what a lab technician does, built into a small box that could work outside a lab. Theranos, she said, had "invented technology that could be programmed" to run "a range of different types of tests." The company believed about 70 assays would cover almost every order from the physician practices it served, "so the goal was to match that test menu."

In October 2015, after The Wall Street Journal reported how few tests the Edison was running, she went on CNBC's Mad Money and said Theranos brought tests onto its own devices according to how often they were ordered.

She also testified, in an exchange quoted in court records, that Theranos had validated so many fingerstick tests that one visit's fingerstick couldn't run them all. A good bleeder, she said, might give enough for about 30. So the picture she presented with her words was, hundreds on a menu and about 30 from a single draw of blood, at most.

There was some real simultaneous reading, on a small scale. In pharmaceutical studies, Theranos cartridges measured three inflammatory markers together from one sample. Company specifications cite an average of six measurements per cartridge, and the largest simultaneous run in the documents is 72 assays on one tray. All of it came from research work that predates the retail launch.

TimePilot found nothing in Holmes's own words claiming hundreds of results from one drop. On the narrow question the film raises, her account held up better than I expected.

Her careful statements fit an attempt to describe a platform. Her looser comments, and the things she let others say about the technology, allow the interpretation that the tech was performing multiple tests simultaneously.

Take a sentence from her September 2013 interview with The Wall Street Journal, which the indictment quotes. Theranos, she said, could "run any combination of tests, including sets of follow-on tests, at once, very quickly, all from a single microsample." Next to her other statements, it describes follow-up tests run from one saved sample. On its own, "at once" and "all from a single microsample" sound like the machine everyone remembers from the press accounts and docudramas. I can understand how different people can take different meanings from the same sentence.

The coverage around her leaned heavily toward one interpretation. The table puts her words beside what was printed and advertised in the same years.

Most of these came from her interviews. An investor reading a few of these articles in a company binder had little reason, based on Holmes’s words, to think that the tech could perform tests for scores of ailments simultaneously. The problem with these articles was the size of the menu they described as available now. Fortune said Theranos “currently offers more than 200” tests, while the Edison was running about 12 on patients. The SEC later alleged that she suggested wording to the Fortune reporter and did not correct the false or misleading statements in articles published from 2013 to 2015. TimePilot found no correction anywhere in the case.

Then there is the text message. On April 29, 2015, Holmes wrote to Sunny Balwani, Theranos's president, about how to describe the company's testing in public. "Then we can say are doing huge number of tests on existing platforms," she wrote. Then: "Also serves as a red herring for device cos." And: "That we're just a 'cheaper' lab."

The exchange is about competitors and the third-party machines Theranos was using for most of its tests. Simultaneous reading capability never comes up. This shows us how she approached public statements, as framing picked for the effect on a particular audience. She even called one of those framings a red herring.

My first instinct was that the message proved she had always thought in platform terms. I put that to TimePilot, and it disagreed. In its view, the message showed she knew the public's picture differed from what the lab was doing and chose to allow the perception to continue. I've come to think we were both right. She thought of the device as a platform, and when a bigger impression helped, she left it alone.

Theranos’s own documents show the same habit. In testimony quoted in court filings, she was asked whether the word “comprehensive” in a company document meant the device could run all routine lab tests. “I, I don’t think that’s what this specific bullet point was referring to,” she said.

So where does this leave us as bystanders wondering whether justice was done properly?

If Holmes meant the platform all along, was she convicted on a misreading? I asked TimePilot directly. The record says no.

The indictment charged that she represented the device as "presently capable" of tasks such as running the full range of clinical tests on small fingerstick samples. That charge holds under either meaning because of the word "presently." On the platform reading, the question becomes how big the working menu was. Holmes's own testimony to the SEC answers it.

She was asked whether she told Walgreens the device was running only about 12 tests. "I don't think so," she said.

Most patient samples went to commercial analyzers Theranos bought from other companies and modified. An August 2013 email in the court record has Holmes telling staff to keep those modifications out of sight of any Siemens representative. So it was really just twelve tests on patients, from a device investors were told could run hundreds.

The rest of the case has nothing to do with how anyone heard "hundreds of tests." The jury heard evidence of revenue projections far above actual revenue. They heard about military use that never happened and of pharmaceutical company logos put on reports those companies hadn't written. Perhaps most damning, they learned about demonstrations where the device appeared to run tests it wasn't running. In January 2022 it convicted Holmes on four counts of defrauding investors and acquitted her on the counts involving patients. The Ninth Circuit affirmed the conviction and the sentence in February 2025. Her appeal never raised the distinction the film explores.

In other words, Elizabeth Holmes did not try to use what Nathan Fielder successfully shocked viewers with. Because it didn’t matter. She was guilty no matter whether you think “can” means one thing or the other.

The government did get one technical point wrong, in Sunny Balwani's case. It believed certain HIV tests ran on Theranos's own device when they ran on conventional machines. The Ninth Circuit held the indictment covered it anyway, because the charge was misrepresenting the accuracy of patient tests, whatever device ran them.

So the prosecution never needed to settle which reading was right. Her representations were false under both. The dramatizations didn't need to settle it either, and the simultaneous screening testing image made a better story. I'd settle it this way: Holmes described a platform, and the platform did a small fraction of what investors were told.

The film keeps asking whether Holmes believes her own account. On the device, at least, the record suggests she might. What she told Fielder is consistent with her deposition, her interviews, and technical documents Theranos wrote years before the collapse of the company.

Believing in the platform is a separate matter from what she let investors believe. The evidence shows she let them believe in something much bigger. The public also believed and so it isn’t surprising that Nathan could play this up.

For investigators, the scene is worth studying further. Keep the subject's own words apart from what others said about them. Put every statement on a timeline with the audience that heard it. Then go looking for the corrections that should be there. What Holmes told Fielder in 2023 sounds reasonable at her kitchen table. It has to be measured against what she said, and what she let others say, in 2013 and 2014, when investors were deciding whether to put money in.

Shultz's objection belongs here too: before you argue about what is being demonstrated, make sure it's the actual device at issue.

I built this demonstration case so students could learn to work a fraud case from the record. Most of the people in that theater were judging Elizabeth Holmes by what she said at her kitchen table.

This post puts some of the record next to it.