▶ Watch Video: Theranos whistleblower weighs in on Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary
Tyler Shultz, a former Theranos employee and one of the whistleblowers credited with exposing Elizabeth Holmes’ now-infamous biotech company as a fraud, said he “was pretty shocked” by the version of Holmes he saw onscreen in the new documentary “You Can See Everything.”
“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 Monday on “CBS Mornings.” “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.
Shultz also said he believes Holmes misled Nathan Fielder, who directed the documentary alongside Lance Oppenheim, when at one point in the film she pulled out what she claimed was Theranos’ blood-testing device.
“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,” said Shultz. “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.”
Holmes never admitted wrongdoing in the wake of the Theranos scandal, a stance on which she held firm in the documentary, which brings viewers inside Holmes’ San Diego rental property in 2023 just weeks before the start of her 11-year prison sentence. At the time, she was living with her partner, Billy Evans, who is also featured prominently in the documentary, and their two children.
Holmes was convicted in 2022 of multiple counts of defrauding Theranos’ investors, who, like the public, were led to believe that the company could conduct thorough clinical analyses on tiny blood samples pricked from a fingertip rather than drawn the traditional way. The technology was billed as revelatory for the field of diagnostics, increasing access to and costs of crucial, even life-saving, testing.
But Theranos turned out to be a sham — the technology couldn’t do what it claimed. And Holmes, who had become a symbol of Silicon Valley’s visionary potential, became the subject of widespread scrutiny as people wondered how she managed to deceive so many, and why she had gone to such great lengths to try to build a business on a false promise.
“She knows that she did something wrong,” Shultz said on Monday. “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.”
Shultz was hired in 2013 as an intern at Theranos, where his grandfather, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, served as a board member. Tyler left the company the following year and went on to serve as an informant for investigations into its dubious practices by The Wall Street Journal and various government regulatory agencies. He later participated in the 2016 HBO documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” which covered Theranos’ downfall.
“You Can See Everything” premiered on Friday and earned $15 million at the box office in its opening weekend, the second-most profitable opening weekend ever for a documentary.
