Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz says Nathan Fielder's new documentary "You Can See Everything" lets Elizabeth Holmes pull the same trick she always has — misleading people about what her blood-testing technology actually did — and the media is once again letting her get away with it.
The film follows Holmes in the weeks before she began her 11-year prison sentence for fraud, and it creates deliberate ambiguity about whether Holmes actually lied about Theranos' capabilities. Shultz, who worked at the company and helped expose it, says the documentary fails because Holmes shows the wrong device and steers the conversation into a semantic rabbit hole — and the director follows her down it.
In one key scene, Holmes lays out components of a Theranos device on her kitchen table and tells Fielder it "could" run any test — if they had developed the chemistries. The film then spends time parsing the word "could." But Shultz says that wasn't the device at all. "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," Shultz told CBS News. The actual device, called the Edison, could only run one blood test at a time.
In a STAT essay, Shultz wrote that Holmes showed Fielder "a future version of the Theranos product that was never completed and never used" to trick him into "litigating the entirely wrong thing."
Holmes never admitted wrongdoing. In the film, she maintains her innocence. Shultz isn't buying it. "She knows that she did something wrong. 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," he said on CBS Mornings.
Here's what the coverage won't touch. The same media ecosystem that spent years hailing Holmes as a visionary — magazine covers, keynote stages, the next Steve Jobs narrative — is now treating this documentary as art rather than accountability. CBS framed its story around Holmes looking like "a broken woman" onscreen. STAT framed its piece around the film's artistic merits. Neither outlet examined its own industry's role in building the Holmes myth, or in dismissing the skeptics who tried to warn the public before patients got hurt.
Shultz knows the cost of challenging a media darling. He left Theranos in 2014 and became an informant for the Wall Street Journal investigation that broke the story open. His grandfather, former Secretary of State George Shultz, sat on the Theranos board — one of a roster of political heavyweights, including secretaries of defense, generals, and senators, who gave Holmes credibility she never earned. When Shultz and others raised alarms, they were ignored or attacked.
The documentary pulled in $15 million its opening weekend — the second-highest documentary debut ever. Audiences are paying to watch a film that, by the whistleblower's own account, lets a convicted fraudster reframe her crime as a semantic misunderstanding. The real question isn't whether Holmes is "broken." It's why the institutions that enabled her — the press, the political class, the investor class — never have to answer for the part they played.







