Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19, built Theranos into a USD 9 billion empire, and later faced an 11-year prison sentence after its blood-testing technology failed.
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Add BollywoodShaadis on GoogleA24 just pulled off a major surprise. Its secret Telluride screening turned out to be You Can See Everything, a new documentary on disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the film starts 34 days before Holmes went to prison for defrauding investors and follows her over three years.
A24 says it began as an intimate portrait and became a mind-bending journey into the abyss. The film is set for a theatrical release in October 2026. While the release date approaches, people are now eager to know more about Elizabeth Holmes.
Elizabeth Holmes was born on February 3, 1984, in Washington D.C., and enrolled at Stanford University to study chemical engineering. In 2003, at 19, she dropped out after filing her first patent for a wearable drug-delivery patch and used her tuition money to found a company originally called Real-Time Cures, later renamed Theranos, a combination of therapy and diagnosis.
Her pitch was simple and powerful. It was a proprietary device that could run hundreds of medical tests from just a few drops of blood taken from a finger prick, making testing cheaper, faster, and more accessible. The idea drew major backing.
By the end of 2010, Theranos had raised over USD 92 million in venture capital, and would eventually raise nearly USD 945 million from high-profile investors including Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch and the Walton family. Elizabeth Holmes cultivated an image modeled on Steve Jobs, wearing black turtlenecks and assembling what was called the most illustrious board in corporate history, including former Secretary of State George Shultz.
In 2014, Forbes named her the world's youngest self-made female billionaire with a USD 4.5 billion net worth, and Theranos was valued at USD 9 billion at its peak. The company struck a retail partnership with Walgreens and promised its Edison machines would be in homes, pharmacies, and even on battlefields.
Behind the scenes, the technology did not work as claimed. The company relied on modified third-party commercial analyzers to run most patient tests while its own devices produced unreliable results.
The unraveling began in 2015 after Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published an investigation questioning Theranos' claims. Regulatory audits and a 2016 study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation found its tests performed poorly and differed from standard labs. Walgreens ended its partnership, and Forbes revised Holmes' net worth to zero.
In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, and former president Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani with massive fraud. Holmes settled by paying a USD 500,000 fine, returning 18.9 million shares, giving up voting control, and being barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for ten years. The company was dissolved in September 2018.
Criminal charges followed. Prosecutors argued that she misrepresented the technology and finances to investors, inducing nearly a billion dollars in investment while achieving no meaningful revenue and concealing device failures. At the trial that started on August 31, 2021, Holmes took the stand and said she believed her statements were accurate at the time.
On January 3, 2022, a federal jury found her guilty on four counts, including three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, related to defrauding investors. She was acquitted on four counts of defrauding patients, and the jury deadlocked on three others.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila sentenced her to 11 years and 3 months in prison plus three years of supervised release in November 2022. Balwani was convicted on all 12 counts in July 2022 and sentenced to 12 years and 11 months. Both were ordered to pay USD 452 million in restitution to victims. Holmes reported to Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a minimum-security camp in Texas, on May 30, 2023.
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