Elizabeth Holmes Is The Subject Of A New A24 Nathan Fielder Documentary

Elizabeth Holmes wanted to change the world. For a while, the world believed she was doing exactly that.

Then it found out the truth, and what happened next became one of the most extraordinary fraud prosecutions in Silicon Valley's history. Now, three years into her prison sentence, she is back on screen. Not played by an actress this time. Herself.

A24 revealed Sunday night at the Telluride Film Festival that Nathan Fielder, the comedian and filmmaker behind Nathan For You and The Rehearsal, has spent three years making a documentary about Holmes called You Can See Everything, co-directed with Lance Oppenheim.

The film began 34 days before Holmes entered federal prison, when she invited Fielder's crew to document her life.

What followed was a three-year journey that continued into her incarceration. A24 released a trailer Sunday alongside the Telluride premiere, Holmes on camera, rocking her baby, looking directly at Fielder and saying: "Why would I deceive you?" Fielder asks: "You're being real right now?" "I'm always being real," she replies.

The film opens in theaters in October 2026. Which means now is a good time to understand who Elizabeth Holmes actually is, and how she got from Stanford dropout to Silicon Valley titan to federal prisoner.

The Rise Of Theranos And The Promise That Changed Everything

Elizabeth Holmes was born in 1984 in Washington, D.C., into a family with roots in government service.

She enrolled at Stanford University at 19 to study chemical engineering and left after her sophomore year in 2003, not because she was failing but because she had an idea. She wanted to build a company that would make blood testing faster, cheaper and less painful than the existing model, in which labs drew large quantities of blood with needles and sent samples off for multi-day analysis.

The company she founded was called Theranos, a portmanteau of "therapy" and "diagnosis." The technology she claimed to have developed was a small proprietary device called the Edison that, according to her pitch, could run hundreds of tests from a single finger-prick blood sample, returning results in hours rather than days and costing a fraction of what traditional labs charged.

The implications were enormous: earlier disease detection, more accessible healthcare, the democratization of medical testing for people who could not afford or access the existing system.

Holmes was a masterful storyteller. She wore the same black turtleneck every day as an explicit tribute to Steve Jobs. She trained her voice to sound lower than it naturally was. She gave TED Talks.

She went on the cover of Forbes, which in 2014 named her the world's youngest female self-made billionaire with a net worth of $4.5 billion.

She sat on Theranos' board with former secretaries of state, former secretaries of defense, former senators. She raised nearly $1 billion from investors. Walgreens and Safeway signed partnerships to offer Theranos testing in their stores. The company was valued at $9 billion at its peak.

None of it worked.

The Fraud And The Fall

The Edison device could not do what Holmes claimed. Its test results were wildly inaccurate. For years, the company secretly ran its finger-prick samples on third-party commercial equipment, the same Siemens and Ortho machines used by traditional labs, while telling patients, investors and partners that its own proprietary technology was producing the results.

Patients were misdiagnosed. Some were told they had conditions they didn't have. Some were incorrectly told they didn't have conditions they did.

In October 2015, the Wall Street Journal's John Carreyrou published an investigation that began unraveling the deception. Regulators arrived. Former laboratory employees cooperated with federal investigators.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found the lab posed "immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety" and revoked its certification. The testing center at Walgreens locations closed. Forbes revised Holmes' net worth to zero. The company shut down.

Holmes was indicted by a federal grand jury in June 2018 on wire fraud and conspiracy charges. Her trial began in September 2021 and concluded in January 2022, when a jury found her guilty on four counts, three counts of wire fraud against investors and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud against investors.

She was acquitted on charges related to defrauding patients. In November 2022, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila sentenced her to 11 years and three months in federal prison.

After exhausting appeals, including an attempt to flee to Mexico the day before sentencing that the judge cited as a reason to deny bail, she began serving her sentence at FPC Bryan in Texas in May 2023. Her release date, after two sentence reductions, is currently August 16, 2032.

The Documentary And The Buzz Around It

You Can See Everything is not a straightforward exposé. Variety's review, published after Sunday's Telluride premiere, called it a "reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama," a film that is as much about the nature of performance and self-deception as it is about the specific fraud Holmes committed.

Fielder, whose prior work has always been interested in the gap between what people claim to be and what they actually are, spent three years with the most famous liar in recent corporate history.

What he found, and what the 174-minute film apparently delivers, is something stranger and more unresolved than a simple takedown.

"I'm always being real," Holmes says in the trailer. The camera pulls back to reveal her holding her baby. Fielder says nothing. The film lets that silence do the work.

You Can See Everything opens in theaters in October 2026 from A24.