Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz says the woman in the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary looks nothing like the executive he once worked for. Appearing Monday on “CBS Mornings,” Shultz called Holmes “a broken woman” in “You Can See Everything,” from directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, and said she misled Fielder in one of the film’s key scenes, CBS News reported.
Shultz knows the company from the inside. He started at Theranos as an intern and joined full time as a research engineer in 2013, working on the company’s Edison blood-testing machine. He quit in April 2014 after raising concerns with Holmes. His grandfather, former Secretary of State George Shultz, sat on the Theranos board at the time. Tyler Shultz later became a confidential source for The Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the company and helped government regulators investigate it. He also appeared in HBO’s 2019 documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.”
Shultz says Holmes is ‘almost unrecognizable’
Shultz said he “was pretty shocked” by the Holmes he saw in the film.
“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 said. “She had so much confidence, and the woman that I saw onscreen looked, frankly, like a, a broken woman.”
“It was almost unrecognizable,” he added.
Whistleblower says Holmes showed the wrong device
Shultz also took issue with a scene in which Holmes lays out what she calls the Theranos device for Fielder.
“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 my problem was: that was not the device that I worked with 12 hours a day. That was not the device that we hid from regulators.
“That was not the device that failed quality controls. That was not the device that we used to knowingly give patients incorrect medical information, and she completely misled [Fielder] down this completely different rabbit hole.”
In an essay published Monday in STAT, Shultz wrote that the machine Holmes showed was a future version that was never finished or used on patients. The Edison he worked on, he wrote, could run only one blood test at a time.
Theranos had promised investors and the public that its technology could run a wide range of lab tests on a few drops of blood from a fingertip instead of a standard blood draw. It couldn’t. In January 2022, a jury convicted Holmes on four counts of fraud and conspiracy for deceiving Theranos investors.
Shultz says Holmes knows what she did
In the film, Holmes still insists she did nothing wrong and that her invention worked. Shultz isn’t buying it.
“She knows that she did something wrong,” Shultz said. “She knows that she was lying, because she created this whole web of lies that you would not have needed to create if you actually believed the lies.”
Still, he admitted the family scenes hit hard, calling it very painful to watch Holmes leave her children to go to prison. That reaction, he said, is exactly what Holmes was after. “I think that was the goal that Elizabeth had, was for you to come away from the movie with you having sympathy for her,” Shultz said.
Background on the documentary and Holmes’ sentence
The film opens 34 days before Holmes reported to federal prison in May 2023. At the time, she was living with her partner, Billy Evans, and their two young children in a rented beachside cottage in Del Mar, California, when the couple invited a film crew in, according to The Associated Press. They also asked Fielder to stay with them. He said no at first, then moved in about 20 days later. The film keeps following Holmes and Evans for about three years after she went to prison.
Holmes was sentenced in 2022 to more than 11 years in prison. That sentence has since been reduced, and her projected release date is now Feb. 22, 2030. She has been approved to move from a federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, to a halfway house in August 2027.
The 174-minute film debuted at the Telluride Film Festival in September and opened in theaters Friday. Playing on fewer than 900 screens, it took in about $15 million over its opening weekend, the second-biggest debut ever for a non-concert documentary, behind only Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” in 2004, according to Bloomberg.
What’s next
A24 plans to expand “You Can See Everything” to more theaters in the coming weeks, and it opens in the U.K. on Nov. 20. No streaming date has been announced.
More Human Interest news from Total Apex Entertainment.
Don't stop here
Every Score. Every Story. One Home.
Breaking sports, entertainment and news from across the Total Apex network, updated all day.
Get the Full Story →
