A former research engineer who worked closely with Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos says “You Can See Everything” doesn’t show, well, everything.
You may remember Tyler Shultz from HBO’s “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” or even the fictionalized series “The Dropout” starring Amanda Seyfried as the disgraced Theranos CEO. He was one of the whistleblowers who raised the alarm when Holmes’ blood-testing technology was not the revolutionary medical device she claimed it to be. Shultz met Holmes through his grandfather, former Secretary of State George Shultz, who sat on the Theranos board of directors and scored Shultz an internship at the medical diagnostic startup, which quickly evolved into a full-time position as a research engineer. During his eight months on the job, he realized something was terribly wrong.
“You Can See Everything” directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim may have fallen into Holmes’ carefully curated trap, Shultz warns in a new essay.
“I’ve had the displeasure of watching disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes at work not just over a three-hour film, but over the entirety of my adult life. I was an employee turned whistleblower at Theranos, my grandfather sat on her board, she came to my family holidays and birthday parties. I met her when I was 20, she went to prison when I was 32,” he wrote in a Stat News op-ed published Monday.
“I wish I could have told director Nathan Fielder what I told [New York Times reporter] John Carreyrou when he started investigating her: Do not underestimate Elizabeth Holmes.”
Los Angeles Times columnist Glenn Whipp wrote that the film leaves viewers with many questions: “about Holmes, about the slippery nature of truth and about the objectivity of documentary filmmaking itself.” The film, labeled a documentary, grossed $15 million this weekend, making it the second-highest-grossing opening for the genre.
But Shultz says that while “You Can See Everything” is an entertaining piece of art, it’s certainly not a documentary, and “it’s dangerous to pretend that it is.”
Shultz calls out what he says are misleading components of the film, including the blood-testing device that Holmes shows Fielder.
“Back to the Theranos device itself. During that scene, my wife had to squeeze my arm to prevent me from jumping out of my seat in the theater and screaming, ‘THAT IS NOT THE DEVICE,’” Shultz writes. “That was not the device I worked with 12 hours a day, not the device we hid from regulators, not the device that constantly failed quality controls, not the device we used to knowingly give patients inaccurate medical results. The device she showed Fielder on the kitchen table was not the reason she went to prison. Elizabeth showed him a future version of the Theranos product that was never completed and never used in order to lead Fielder down this BS semantic rabbit hole and to trick him into litigating the entirely wrong thing.”
The research engineer-turned-whistleblower also called out the quaint two-bedroom condo in which the film was shot, pointing out that Holmes had just recently lived with partner Billy Evans, whose family owns a luxury resort in San Diego, in an estate listed at $125 million.
He also raises questions about the abuse Holmes suffered at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, convicted fraudster and Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. Shultz claims Holmes spotted Balwani’s abusive tendencies and clocked him as the perfect fall guy if things went south.
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