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Tyler Shultz, a former Theranos employee and one of the whistleblowers credited with coming forward Elizabeth Holmes’ now-famous biotech company as a fraud, he said that he was “very shocked” by the version of Holmes that he saw on the screen in the new documentary “You Can See Everything”.
“The Elizabeth I knew absolutely commanded a room, even if that room was full of secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, generals, generals. She would have a room,” Shultz said Monday on “CBS Mornings.” “She had so much confidence, and the woman I saw on screen looked, quite frankly, like a broken woman.
“It was almost unrecognizable,” he said.
Shultz also said he believed Holmes seduced Nathan Fielder, who co-directed the documentary with Lance Oppenheim, when at one point in the film she pulled out what she said was a Theranos blood test kit.
“She takes out the Theranos machine, and she puts it over the table and every part of it, so you know you can see everything,” Shultz said. “But my problem was: It wasn’t the machine I worked with 12 hours a day. It wasn’t the machine we hid from regulators. It wasn’t the machine that failed quality control. [Fielder] down this whole different rabbit hole.”
Holmes never admitted to the crime after the Theranos scandala position she insisted on in the documentary that takes viewers inside Holmes’s San Diego rental building in 2023 just weeks before her 11-year prison sentence began. At the time, she was living with her partner, Billy Evans, who also appears prominently in the documentary, and their two children.
Holmes was convicted in 2022 of multiple counts of misleading Theranos investors, who, like the public, were led to believe that the company could perform detailed clinical analyzes on tiny blood samples pricked from a finger instead of being drawn in the traditional way. The technology has been announced as a reporter for the diagnostic field, increasing the access and costs of vital, even life-saving, tests.
But Theranos turned out to be a sham – the technology couldn’t do what it said. And Holmes, who became a symbol of Silicon Valley visionary ability, became the subject of extensive scrutiny as people wondered how she managed to deceive so many, and why she went to such lengths to try to build a business on a false promise.
“She knows she did something wrong,” Shultz said Monday. “She knows she was lying, because she created this whole web of lies that you wouldn’t need to create if you really believed the lies.
Shultz was hired in 2013 as an employee of Theranos, where his grandfather, former US Secretary of State George Shultz, was a board member. Tyler left the company the following year and went on to become an informant for investigations into his questionable 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 the fall of Theranos.
“You Can See Everything” premiered Friday and earned $15 million at the box office in its opening weekend, the second-highest-grossing opening weekend of all time for a documentary.
