What’s the Deal With Billy Evans? A Spoiler-Filled Guide to ‘You Can See Everything’

A new documentary on Elizabeth Holmes

0:00It's been a week since I've seen You Can See Everything, the new documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, and I still want to talk about it. And from what I'm hearing, most of you want to talk about it too. And I'm not surprised. As we discussed on the episode last week, Elizabeth Holmes has proven to be one of the most enduringly fascinating characters our culture has produced. On top of that, the documentary introduces us to a new fascinating and emblematic character. Holmes' domineering, sniffling, gun-toting romantic partner, Billy Evans.

0:32The movie raises a lot of questions about Holmes. Is she a sociopath, neurodivergent, self-aware, controlled by the men in her life? But it raises as many questions about Evans, like, who is this guy? Where does he come from, and why does he care so much about his scrambled eggs? What is he like when the cameras are off? And what is he getting out of this relationship? For that matter, what is she getting out of it? So we're going to take on these two characters one at a time. By talking with people who have reported on them. First, I talked to Times Finance reporter Rob Copeland, who spoke extensively with Billy while reporting on his blood-testing startup last year, and whose reaction to You Can See Everything surprised me.

1:08We were joined by Aaron Griffith, who reported on the Theranos trial, to discuss the fascinating character of Billy, the mystery of their relationship, and the response to the film in Silicon Valley. Then, John Carreyrou came back to answer your questions about Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos, and the truth of what she knows. One final note. While we were gentle last week, this episode is filled with spoilers. If you haven't seen You Can See Everything, I suggest you hit pause now. But if you have, sit back and relax. I'm Max Reed.

Introducing Billy Evans and Hemanthus

1:36This is Hard Fork. I'm joined by finance reporter Rob Copeland, who interviewed Billy Evans about his new startup last year, and tech writer Aaron Griffith, who reported on Elizabeth Holmes' trial for The Times. Welcome to Hard Fork, guys. Hey. Thank you. So one of the biggest surprises of this movie is that the person who kind of dominates it over three hours is not Elizabeth Holmes, the subject, is not Nathan Fielder, the director, documentarian.

2:06It's this guy, Billy Evans, Elizabeth Holmes' romantic partner and also business partner. Billy is basically the protagonist, certainly, of the second half of the movie. I don't think this is the right phrase, but he is kind of the breakout star to the extent that a kind of sniffling, reactionary, quasi-manic, you know, force can be thought of, you know, in a three-hour documentary, can be referred to as the breakout star. But he is the person about whom, when I emerged, I kind of had the most questions.

2:37So, Rob, you spoke with Billy for an article you wrote last May called Elizabeth Holmes' Partner Has a New Blood Testing Startup. I want to get into that story, the connection to Theranos, but maybe we can start by you telling us how that story came together. Sure. So this might be crazy if you've seen the movie now, but a year ago-ish, someone told me that they heard that Billy Evans had a blood testing startup, and I thought that was the wildest thing I'd ever heard. I thought I was being scammed. I thought, like, seriously, like, be more creative than Elizabeth Holmes is doing it all over again.

3:10So you hear that he's running a blood testing startup and you start making calls. I started making calls and someone had sort of tipped me off that he had asked them for money. And this person obviously took the meeting for the same reason we would, which was, I can't believe this is happening. I will say that last year when I sort of got wind that there was such thing as Theranos 2.0, although that wasn't what they were calling it by that time, I thought Billy Evans, I thought I'd call Billy Evans and he would tell me to, you know, jump off a bridge. And in fact, he was extremely charming.

3:41When I called him and I said, I'd want to talk about your startup, he said, which startup? That's a good joke. I mean, maybe the one that involves blood testing, but yeah. Yeah. So tell me a little more about this business. We know it's called Hemanthus, which is the name of a flower also known as the blood lily. And it's really intended for pets. Correct. It was the idea was you could take a sample from your pet instead of having to go to a vet and spend, say, $500 on a blood test. You could you could do it for, you know, a dollar a test.

4:13And presumably the reason they're starting with pets is that it's a sort of lower regulatory threshold for them. Well, Max, I'm glad you asked because I just so happen to have here a piece of paper that Billy sent me, which was evidence in his mind that this was a lower regulated business, that it's dated October 2024 and it's correspondence with the USDA. And he said that this is evidence that we are allowed to do this. I called the USDA. They said, that's not what that means.

4:44And what do you think was different between the Billy you talked to and the Billy that we see in the movie, if anything? Well, I would say that the big similarity is that Billy has a tendency to say, you can ask me anything you want, that he is an open book. And then you can see everything.

5:03Aaron, enough. And then proceeds to, you know, not tell you everything that you do want to know. So the big difference between what I was talking about and what was on screen was that on screen he's so open about how Elizabeth is involved in this. I mean, I would have had no idea last year while I was speaking to him that they had already filmed months or years of footage of the two of them starting this thing together. Yeah. My impression was that she had nothing to do with this company, that they didn't bring her up in meetings.

5:36It was like she who must not be named. She's certainly not mentioned in the deck and that Billy will give you long speeches about how qualified he is to start this. What a brilliant scientist he is, how he helped start this company, which helps do like radar for self-driving cars. So it was like the biggest inside joke, right? Because it's a blood testing startup from Elizabeth Holmes' partner. The photographs they're providing look suspiciously identical to the Theranos device. But, oh, goodness gracious, don't, you know, don't make the connection.

6:08I thought that I was breaking the biggest story in the history of technology, business, and media. And it turned out that Billy had been filming a documentary, like memorializing it for two years. So just to put this in the context of the film. So 2023, we see them in San Diego. They're both on the phone with what we understand to be potential investors in this new thing they're starting up. Elizabeth goes to jail. Billy continues working on it. Around 2025, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the directors of the documentary, start visiting him in Austin again.

6:42And it's around this same time that you are discovering that this startup is coming out. And you eventually publish the piece. What was his reaction to your piece? He was not thrilled with the piece. I think it's fair to say. I mean, he probably was fighting it all along the way, right? I'm assuming that, like, if they wanted this documentary to be the big reveal of Theranos 2.0, your story would have messed that up. Yeah. He kept trying to sort of push the story down the line, kept saying, oh, you can come visit the lab. You can do a great story of the lab.

7:14And then I would say, okay, what's in the lab? And he'd say, well, the lab isn't working yet. So at that point, I'm sitting with my editors and I'm saying, well, what are we going to see in Austin? And to be clear, this startup had raised somewhere around $3 million, which, much respect to Mr. Evans, is just not enough to start a blood testing company. I think you've got to start somewhere. I mean, I think Theranos' first checks were probably very small, too, and then they eventually built up to, you know, $100 million from Murdoch. I would love to start with $3 million personally.

7:45Did you talk to anybody who did invest in this business? I didn't speak to anyone who did, although we did find records of at least one person who had invested in it. He runs a tapas restaurant in downtown Austin, and Billy described him to me as a friend. So it seems like it was at that level. But to your point, Rob, this is not, you know, what we're hearing is a company that's raised $3 million, which is two orders of magnitude lower than it would take to sort of think about yourself as a tech player. As far as we know, there are not many notable investors except for this gentleman who owns a tapas bar in Austin.

8:19I mean, how would you—I'm trying to think of the right way to ask this question. Is this a real company? If I were Elizabeth, right, I would say, what is a real company? What do you mean by real?

8:32It's a real company in the sense that it did successfully raise money. It's not a real company in the sense that it has a product that does anything. What really struck me, too, was the gall. I mean, Billy was going after huge investors. He was going after, you know, Jim Breyer, one of the first backers of Facebook, going after Michael Dell, probably the most famous investor not named Elon Musk in Texas. He really thought that he was going to be able to raise money from sort of the top tier for this. What I thought is so notable about your story, too, is, like, in Silicon Valley, there's this kind of, like, unspoken rule where if you pass on a company, you might tell your friends, like, oh, we didn't invest in that.

9:12But, like, it sends a really negative signal to the company, and you don't want to be seen as, like, not founder-friendly. And so, no investor would ever publicly to the New York Times or anyone in the media say, I declined to invest in this company. And, in fact, that's what stopped investors the first time around with Theranos 1.0 from speaking out and saying, I looked at this company, but it didn't pass the smell test for me. They're all kind of worried about coming off as, you know, not founder-friendly. And so the fact that you have someone like Jim Breyer in there on the record saying, we looked at this company, and we thought it was no good, and so we passed, is, like, that is actually extremely unusual.

9:51Well, it sort of speaks also, I think, to the fact that Billy is not someone that anyone thought that they had to protect. You know, there's not a future relationship with Billy Evans that anybody necessarily wanted. Well, okay, one other question that I had, isn't part of Elizabeth's punishment as a felon, now convicted, that she can't be involved in securities? She can't be an officer, for sure. Can she informally advise her partner on his company?

10:22I mean, how could you enforce that, right? Well, I mean, certainly if it was illegal, you wouldn't want to have, say, a lot of footage of the two of you making a bunch of investment calls on behalf of the company. If those calls were made in 2023, I do question their veracity, because this company was not raising money in 2023. Wait, what do you mean? If those calls were filmed in 2023, there was no Theranos 2.0. I mean, maybe they were casual phone calls, but those were not, like, serious, were about to raise money. The real Hemanthus starts around 2024, so about a year later.

10:56They don't have offices. They're still working out of, like, a house in Austin as of last year. So still a very, very early startup. And so, at this point, Elizabeth Holmes is in prison. So this is entirely, I mean, with the exception of whatever advice she's giving him during their visiting days, this is entirely Billy. Correct, yeah. And they have a patent, and she's not on it. Right. Let me take this in a slightly different direction.

Analyzing their relationship and public image

11:18Having now seen the movie, and this question is for both of you, what did you make of their relationship? I mean, we talked about this a little bit last week, but it just was so reminiscent of her relationship with Sunny Balwani, especially when it comes down to the fact that they're starting the same company again, over again. And it's clear that the movie wants you to sort of make that connection. When I was preparing for this podcast, I went back and looked at the eight-page, single-spaced letter that Billy wrote to the court ahead of Holmes' sentencing to try to essentially argue for her to get a lower sentence.

11:57And there was, like, over 100 letters that she collected from a bunch of people. And it was really fascinating because it was kind of the first look into her personal life. There was a lot of photos in his letter, but, like, one thing that really stuck out to me was that even then, he was kind of participating in this narrative that the movie continues, which is that she's this sort of weird person who doesn't really relate to others in the same way. And that's why she was a little bit of a miscommunicator with investors. And he had this line in it that was like, you know, everything about her, so many things that were written about her were untrue, including the fact that she's a good salesperson.

12:33And he writes, Liz has no ability to sell something. She simply believes in things with such depth that it is alluring. She's more of a zealot than a showman. And it kind of fits into this movie a little bit because the movie is showing us how she believes her own reality. And so you're like, okay, I sort of see the narrative that you're making, and it actually is kind of proven out in the movie. Yeah. I think I had a slightly different take, which was, one, I didn't necessarily buy their relationship 100%. But as someone who interviews people for a living, he did something very recognizable, which is he volunteered answers to questions that were not asked.

13:15You know, Nathan asks him, you know, if he was dating other people when he met Elizabeth. And all of a sudden, he's volunteering. I was dating three people, actually. It was like he has like a PR strategy to answer the question he wishes he was asked. And it's sort of our job as journalists to get around that or to just repeat the question. But that seems very, very B-list corporate executive who's just done one day of PR training to me. Probably at 2x speed, right? Yeah. For sure.

13:47Whereas she at least, Elizabeth was sort of a difficult person to interview, really, if you were trying to get anything through her, because she's just looking at you and not blinking. Do you guys think, I mean, I'm just going to come out and ask you, do you guys think they're in love? Yeah. I mean, maybe I just am a sucker who got taken along for a ride by Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes. But I felt like their relationship was genuine. It was maybe the most genuine thing in the whole movie. I thought, honestly, they had definitely made eggs together before.

14:18Like she, he knew how long that was going to take. And I, I related to that. Having made eggs with somebody in the past, you were able to recognize that exact, exact dynamic. And by the way, for the record, he's, he's wrong. You shouldn't overbeat scrambled eggs. It makes them tough. She was doing a better job. This is the kind of hard hitting stuff you can only get on Hard Fork. Like how to make eggs. So one reason I want to ask about the love stuff is something that has come together in our conversations, Rob, for me is the sense that part of what Billy gets out of this relationship is attention, notoriety, sort of access to people that he might not otherwise have.

15:01You know, in many ways, it sounds like Humanthus is a sort of circus show. It doesn't have a ton of money. It's kind of the only thing it offers is this kind of inside joke, as you were saying.

Silicon Valley venture capital trends

15:11So I wanted to ask you, Aaron, as somebody who reports on the world of investing in Silicon Valley. I mean, is there any chance that they could, that they could build this into something bigger than, than a sort of a joke? Well, I mean, there has been this trend in the last few years of big Silicon Valley venture capital firms doing what can be kind of characterized as a troll investment, writing a big check to someone who has either been like canceled or embroiled in controversy. There's been a few of these deals lately.

15:43A lot of them are coming from Andreessen Horowitz. They gave money to Andy Rubin, who was pushed out of Google after being accused of sexual impropriety with some colleagues. They gave over $300 million to Adam Neumann for his WeWork kind of WeLive flow company. There is this kind of history of, like, firms investing in a controversial founder as a way to make a stand to say, like, we don't care about, like, the media or the zeitgeist or the cancel culture or anything like that.

16:13We are going to back founders no matter what. And so I could see somebody taking that side of the bet. That said, I did do a little search, and I haven't seen too many examples of VC firms doing this for people who are actually convicted of fraud. And so, I mean, she's a felon. And so the only example that I can find is Trevor Milton, who was the CEO of Nikola, the self-driving truck company that they, you know, famously posted that video of their truck driving itself.

16:49But, in fact, it was rolling down a hill. And that guy was pardoned by Trump, and he now has a new company called Cyberjet Aircraft that they were going out trying to raise some money. You know, he's the CEO of that company, and I don't know if they've actually raised a lot of money. Billy McFarlane from Fyrefest not been successful in trying to raise money. So I do think there's a chance that they draw a line at, you know, someone who has actually been convicted of fraud, you know, TBD on Sam Bankman-Fried.

17:21Yeah. Whenever he gets out or if he's working on FTX 2.0 with Carolyn Ellison from, you know, from prison. Speaking of the great love stories of our time. Can I add, sorry, just one thing I sort of disagree with you on, Aaron, is I think we underestimate a little bit how much, at least on Wall Street for sure, how much they love to prove journalists wrong, pundits wrong. So the fact that this film has reignited a whole bunch of people like us talking about, oh my gosh, can you believe what she did?

17:51Can you believe she actually, no, guys, I swear she was found guilty by a jury of her peers. That just pushes people, that pushes that button, right, to like, to flip back at you. So at least I've definitely been hearing from people who want me to know that, like, she's not all that bad. I could see a universe in which, you know, it works. I think the way, the thing that it would hinge on is if she gets a pardon, because then that's just an easy way to tell that story to investors and for them to tell it to their LPs.

18:25I mean, one thing, I'm glad you brought that up, because one theme of the movie and one thing that consistency and the thing you're talking about is there's a political edge to this.

Political shifts and the Twitter account

18:34And part of the journey we see Billy take over the course of the film is from this kind of overprotective, but, I mean, let's be honest, controlling sort of supportive partner to this, you know, jaw-grinding, gun-toting reactionary who's defending Charlie Kirk over the dinner table. And it seems, you know, I want to note, too, that Jessica Reed Krause, who runs a blog called House and Habit, which is sort of, I'm not quite sure how to put it other than to say it's kind of a MAGA gossip blog, has declared Elizabeth Holmes the original Maha.

19:09So there is, I think there are these sort of vague efforts to kind of grab onto Holmes, you know, aided by Billy as a kind of Trumpian figure, as a figure for the tech right. So maybe if anybody's going to do it, it would be Andreessen Horowitz. But I think I agree with you that there needs to be some kind of pardon or mechanism that they can tell the story. A MAGA gossip blog is what Erin calls me on Slack when she's angry.

19:36Speaking of the Charlie Kirk scene, one of the sort of big actual real-world revelations in the movie, maybe big is overstating it, but it certainly feels big in the movie, is that Elizabeth Holmes' Twitter account, which has been active over the last period of time that she's been in prison and has gotten strangely combative and conservative, is being run by Billy. And Billy is sort of claiming that she, either that she's sending him the specific words or that he's just, he's tweeting on her behalf.

20:06I imagine, Rob, you had no idea that this was happening while you were interviewing him. I had no idea and it would have been so off the wall, truly. So there's one tweet in particular that, uh, it doesn't quite play a role in the movie, but it bears, it's, it bears on something that happens in the movie. I'm going to read this and then some other tweets. And I want you guys to tell me whether you think those are tweets from Elizabeth Holmes or from Billy Evans. So the first tweet, Charlie Kirk talked profoundly about forgiveness, its power. I keep thinking about that today and what it means to rise in the face of the unforgivable.

20:40Is that Elizabeth Holmes or Billy Evans? That sounds like her. I mean, it's like pretty obvious, especially having watched the movie, uh, which tweets are coming from Holmes and which ones are coming from Billy. Okay. I'm going to read. There's like one that's like very online brain and, and then the other is kind of like this fortune cookie, like, uh, you know, inspirational stuff. Okay. Here's one. She posts a photo of, uh, Daenerys from Game of Thrones. Daenerys is the dragon princess who emerges from flames, having birthed dragons to retake her throne. And she says, they can bruise and bloody me, but still I rise.

21:13Is that Elizabeth or Billy? I mean, given that she didn't even know about Abbott and Costello, I feel like she probably hasn't seen Game of Thrones. Maybe, but it feels like Billy. That's a Billy one. Okay. One about, uh, Zoran Mamdani. What are the odds that Zoran Mamdani? I'm just going to, Billy. It's funny. How does she even know? Wait, is she, she's, oh, this councilman that she really liked.

21:38Um, okay. Here's one. It's a question. Ever feel like a book was written for you? Question mark. And it is an, I'm pretty sure AI generated image of a hardcover book. The title of which is how to fit into society when you're an alien from an alternate universe. I mean, this speaks to the narrative that I was talking about that Billy's trying to put out there about her, about like how she's just so strange and unknowable and weird. So in a way it kind of feels like him. And also we know at least that she did not AI generate from prison.

22:10Um, okay. I'm going to do one more. Um, thank you for playing along with this game. It just says, never forget who you are. That sounds like her. Oh, I was going to say Billy. I do wonder. I mean, it depends on if you see it with menace or with like inspo, right? I do sort of wonder a little bit. Uh, I don't want to speculate too much about this, but there is a kind of suggestion in the way they talk about her and Billy's closeness with her, even in prison, that she has a phone somewhere in jail.

22:41So I can, I've actually done some reporting on this, uh, with, I don't know if you ever heard of this young man, Martin Screlly, um, who was in prison. Um, and I did a bit of reporting on SPF too. Uh, everyone has a phone in prison. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's the biggest, uh, unspoken secret, um, that the guards love when you have phones because then they don't have to worry. I mean, well, the safest thing you could do is just be watching stupid Tik TOK all day. Wow. That's a, that's a really powerful thought for all of us to have when we scroll tonight, that the guards are happy when we're not doing anything interesting.

23:12Um, guys, thank you for coming and talking about Billy Evans, Elizabeth Holmes, and you can see everything with me. We're going to take a break. When we come back, I want to talk about news and the things you guys are tracking right now. And then after that, John Kerry Rue is back to answer reader questions about, uh, the movie.

23:38We're back on hard fork with finance reporter, Rob Copeland and tech writer, Aaron Griffith.

Tracking CoreWeave and AI infrastructure

23:42We've just been talking about Billy Evans. And now I've asked my guests to bring a piece of news that they are tracking this week. Um, and tell us a little bit about why they think it's important. Rob, what are you following this week and why is it important? So I am all of a sudden obsessed with this company you haven't heard of called CoreWeave. CoreWeave is a... I know CoreWeave. Oh, pardon me, Aaron, but... Get your own topic. Tell me, tell me about... Welcome to AI Infra. Yeah. Tell me about CoreWeave, Rob. So CoreWeave is an AI middleman, essentially.

24:14What they do is they buy the compute, the processors, they stick it into warehouses, and they lease the space to companies whose names you might have heard of, like Anthropic or these other AI huge startups. The problem is that to grow so fast, they've taken on just a huge amount of debt. They have something like $70 billion in liabilities across 51 different data centers, and their stock is all of a sudden in a free fall. Their debt, they're starting to have to pay twice as much to service the debt.

24:48It's just a classic Wall Street financing story of a company that grew and grew and grew and grew and just assumed the market would go one direction up. And spoiler alert, there's always another side. Do you think that they're a canary in the coal mine for, like, all of this crazy infra spend that's been happening over the last four years? They're definitely an early sign of that. What I will say is that everyone, myself included, is super into AI as a tech story, as a, you

25:18know, what can Muse do? But for my seat, it's a financing story as much as anything else. These companies have said that they need to borrow as much as $10 trillion to get this to work. We're nowhere near even beginning that climb, and we're already starting to see the market shake a little. So this is not the kind of thing, in your estimation, where CoreWeave could go down, but everything else, the line keeps going up and to the right? No, this is very much, they're a proxy for a certain part of the market at large. The financial aspect of this story we're going to see play out, in my opinion, faster than

25:52the technological side. And I think this, like, really ties into, I mean, I'm working on a story on this now. This ties into Anthropik's IPO as well, like, because everyone's looking to Anthropik to see, is this demand for AI unlimited, or are there kind of limits, or is it elastic, and that, you know, people have limits on what they're willing to pay, because that then trickles down to the likes of CoreWeave, right? And we say trickles, by the way. Anthropik is so huge, this $1.5 trillion or so offering.

26:24CoreWeave is a $40 billion company. This isn't, like, trickles down to a nobody. These are real-sized companies. Right, it's not Himanthus. It's not.

26:35Well, shots fired over here at the Hard Fork Studios. It's roughly 10,000 Himanthuses. Exactly. And we saw even this week, Ken Griffin, one of the most famous hedge fund investors, said that he thought that we're in an AI bubble. When you start hearing that from my seat, you just start waiting to see, you know, what falls first. Well, that's a cheery piece of news, Rob. Thank you. Erin, what are you tracking this week?

Elon Musk and empire consolidation

26:58I'm interested in Elon Musk's empire consolidation continuing. Ever since SpaceX decided that it was going to rush into the public markets, there's been speculation that the whole point of it is to set the company up so it can more easily merge with Tesla. And so earlier this week on SpaceX's earnings call, Elon Musk basically confirmed that. He said, you know, they're setting up committees of independent directors to explore a potential

27:30merger between giant SpaceX and giant Tesla. And he had this really amazing quote that was, because I'm a conflicted party, I can't actually be in the discussions, which is like just. For someone in that position, you know, it's very, very funny to me. Someone should make a three hour documentary about this guy. Four. Four hours, in fact, is the Musk documentary. Rob, I'm sure you have pretty strong views on this as well.

28:01So I'd love to hear your thoughts. Well, my strongest view, as always, and this is copyright, reporters make terrible securities analysts. So, you know, you don't listen to us. What I will say is we all laughed at XAI and SpaceX merging earlier this year. It was a hugely positive thing for the IPO. It's worked out by every possible standard so far. So it's easy to laugh at this stuff. I do have a track record of Musk, you know, consolidating his empire is just.

28:33It is exactly that story going all the way back to when Tesla bought SolarCity. You know, everyone was kind of mad about it. It made no sense. He's just using one of his good businesses to rescue a struggling business. But like you said, it it has it has really all worked out for him in the end. And so I think people seeing that track record are very willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. And really what's driving this, I think, is that Elon Musk does not have does not have control of Tesla in the same way that he does of SpaceX. And so, you know, shareholders are able to push back a lot more.

29:06They have a little bit more leverage than they do with SpaceX. And so I think merging them would give him the opportunity to kind of get that control back. And if he wants to throw a ton of money and lose a ton of money in the short term on, you know, investing in robots for Tesla, he has more runway to do that if he's got more control, I think. I want to share my story that I'm tracking, which is that Joel Kaplan, Meta's global policy

Joel Kaplan leaving Meta

29:30chief, is leaving the company after 15 years. Kaplan is, to me, at least, a really fascinating figure who's a Scalia clerk. He participated in the infamous Brooks Brothers riot during the 2000 elections. And probably most famously to people who aren't like, you know, committed Facebookologists, he was a close friend of, is a close friend of Brett Kavanaugh's and sat behind the Supreme Court justice during his confirmation hearings. This is, of course, when Christine Blasey Ford accused him of rape. But his role at Facebook has been a sort of conservative whisperer.

30:02You know, Facebook, for the first 10 years of its existence, 15 years of its existence was, probably got more criticism from the right than it did from the left. And there's all these sort of, in my opinion, sort of manufactured controversies about censorship and shadow banning and trending topics. And Kaplan's legacy, I think, was helping them navigate through those mostly by shifting the company externally and internally a little bit to the right. And, you know, it would be sort of satisfying, I think, to imagine, you know, if you are politically

30:33on the left, satisfying to imagine that Kaplan is leaving because the Republicans are going to get blown out in the midterms. But it seems much more likely that he's just leaving because it's been 15 years and the job is probably exhausting and he's made a bundle of money. And why stick around? Where do we where do you think he's going to land? I mean, probably somewhere in the Trump administration. I mean, it's a it's a good question. I suspect he's like a Rubio 2028 guy. That's that's I'm going to put that marker down right now. But I think for the next few months, it's like whatever the open guest house on Kauai with

31:04you know, at Mark's at Mark's estate is probably the place he's going to go. So do you have a group chat with the other Facebook ologist? It's like, yeah, no, I like to just keep it, you know, notes to myself. I've got like a nice little cork board in my garage and some red yarn. So I connect things. I don't need to talk to people about this stuff. Where do they go when they when they leave Facebook? Then do you have like a little separate, you know, island? Yeah. Well, I've got a couple of different filing cabinets. Don't worry about what I'm doing in my private time. By the way, what struck me was that he's being replaced by Dina Powell McCormick, who has

31:37been there for I think she gets a new job every month there. She's a former Goldman Sachs banker, a big Wall Street figure, one of the most charming saleswoman or salespeople, I should say, on the street. She's I saw her last at a conference in May where she was trying to convince me to try those the glasses that they they came out with. She truly even her a truly gifted salesperson could not convince one person to put those glasses at that party on. As Rob is talking about how charming he's finding these people, I just want to remind

32:09you this conversation started with a discussion of how charming he found Billy Evans, just as you're trying to sort of adjust in your head Rob's ability to suss out charisma. Guys, thank you for coming. Thank you for joining us talking about Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, the movie, the news. When we come back, we have John Kerry-Ruback answering audience questions about Elizabeth Holmes and the Nathan Fielder documentary, You Can See Everything.

John Carreyrou on the viral documentary

32:46John, welcome back to Hard Fork. Thanks for having me again. This is becoming a regular thing. Yeah, I'm enjoying it. So we saw this movie last week. We both enjoyed it. We had a great conversation about it on Friday. And then since then, the movie has actually come out. And there's been a frenzy over Elizabeth Holmes, over some of the stuff that comes out in the movie. I am wondering what your experience of that has been like. You had sort of been saying you were done with the Elizabeth Holmes story and here you are right back in it. I mean, it's been surreal. I feel this movie has gone completely viral and it feels like the story has only become

33:22bigger in terms of the public impact. Even, you know, at the height of my newspaper reporting for the Wall Street Journal in 2015, 2016, the height of publicity around the book, 2018, or even, you know, the coverage of the trial, I never felt like quite as many people were being read into the story and paying attention as now. Yeah, I was talking with some of our production staff and they were saying they've been going to bookstores to pick up a copy and it's sold out here in New York, that it's going off the shelves in airport bookstores.

33:57Have you heard any of this? Yeah, before walking into the studio, I got an email from my editor at Knopf telling me that they just printed another batch of 10,000 copies. And it's been great. I like the fact that people are going to, you know, what I like to think is the definitive account of what happened. They don't want to stop at just seeing the film. A lot of people, you know, understand that this is art and they also want to get at the underlying facts and understand the underlying facts.

34:28Yeah. So last week we talked about the movie. We did our best to avoid sort of spoilers because a lot of amazing, insane, unrepeatable stuff happens in the second half of the movie. Is there anything that you have been thinking about since or that you wish we could have talked about last week since this is a spoilers episode? Well, the second half of the film, for those who have seen it, is structured around trying to answer the mystery question of whether Elizabeth knew or not that she and Billy were going to profit from the movie in the original deal that Billy had reached with A24.

35:07And I came away thinking that there's no way she didn't know. I just don't think it's possible. Yeah. I mean, maybe this is a good opportunity to get into some of the facts. One of the interesting reactions I've seen is I think people who haven't read Bad Blood, which I recommend everybody read. It's a great book of reporting and a sort of fascinating documentation of a particular culture in Silicon Valley in the years that Theranos was around. People who haven't read it are not necessarily as familiar with exactly what was going on at Theranos or with Elizabeth Holmes.

35:38And we solicited a bunch of questions from the many people who were commenting and talking, and a lot of them had questions for you. And here's one that just sort of to start with, to like get us a kind of map on the ground, is a question from Ben Ryan.

The evidence of fraud and Tyler Schultz

35:52And he asks, what are the most unimpeachable pieces of evidence that Elizabeth Holmes is a fraudster? So, you know, she gave media interviews and she met with investors in 2014 and 2015 and represented very explicitly that she had a new technology, a new device that could do hundreds of blood tests off just one drop of blood pricked from a finger. However, the reality, which has, you know, was shown by my reporting in the book, but also then later confirmed in the trial, was that they had a machine that could do 12 tests.

36:30And that machine, which was called the Edison, was a machine that was very faulty. And, you know, they had to void every single one of those 12 types of tests for which they issued results. Every single result had to be voided. That's how riddled with errors that machine was. Tyler Schultz, who was one of the whistleblowers, one of my confidential sources at the time, grandson of the former Secretary of State George Schultz, pointed out when he went on CBS this morning yesterday that the machine that she unpacks for Nathan Fielder, and you can see everything, isn't the Edison.

37:11It's a machine that was called the Minilab, which was the next iteration of the Theranos machine that was supposed to cram more components into one device and was supposed to do more tests and have more capabilities. That machine was never finished. It never convincingly produced reliable test results, and they were never confident enough with it to use it on live patients. And so, you know, there's a bit of obfuscation and misleading going on in the film, in that scene, when, you know, she unpacks that device, and it's not even the device that they used on Theranos' patients.

37:53Right. Can you actually talk a little bit about Tyler Schultz? He doesn't come up in the movie at all, but he's a sort of, I mean, I don't want to narrativize it too much, but he's a sort of main character in the story of Theranos and its decline and fall. How did you come to hear from him, and what was his role in your reporting and further in the fraud trial? Yeah, so my first primary source, the first primary source I made contact with, and I can now use his real name, I was shielding his identity for years, is Adam Rosendorf, who shortly before he began talking to me was the laboratory, clinical laboratory director at Theranos.

38:31And when I started talking to him, I think it was in February of 2015, you know, he was terrified. Uh, I asked him if there were other people who might be willing to talk to me if I, you know, I was looking for other corroborating sources. And in that very first conversation, he mentioned a young man named Tyler Schultz, who had left the company, I think it was about eight months earlier, and who he had reason to believe had left on bad terms and had been raising questions.

39:01He didn't know the details, but he thought, you should look this kid up, and oh, by the way, he's George Schultz's grandson. So the grandson of a, you know, a very high-profile board member had left the company and potentially, you know, could be a corroborating source. And so that got my interest and attention, and I tried to get in touch with Tyler in the ensuing weeks, wasn't able to. I reached out to him through LinkedIn, and I don't think I heard from him for like two months.

39:33And then suddenly I was at my desk at the Wall Street Journal's newsroom in Midtown one afternoon, and my phone rings. Out of the blue, I answer, and it's Tyler Schultz. And so Tyler was in a fairly awkward position as a whistleblower who also was related to a person who was involved in the management of Theranos. And I think one of the things that maybe gets lost in the film a little bit is the extent to which Holmes and Theranos respond, like the lengths to which they went to pursue you, to pursue Schultz, trying to stop this story.

40:05If you could tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, so Tyler actually tried to blow the whistle to Elizabeth first and to meet with her and tell her what was bothering him. And that didn't go very well. She sort of fobbed him off to Sonny, who got really angry with him, and to the lawyers. And so then he tried to blow the whistle to his grandfather. And his grandfather didn't believe him and wouldn't listen to him. And so he ended up leaving the company after a little less than a year.

40:36And then when I started getting in touch with X and current Theranos employees, word got around through the grapevine among X employees. And Tyler got really concerned that if he did get in contact with me, that the company would somehow know. Because, you know, litigation was always, the threat of litigation was always in the air when you worked at Theranos. And it turns out, I later learned, that they had figured out who several of my sources were.

41:07And they had ambushed Tyler at George Schultz's house, which was on the Stanford campus, and tried to get him to admit that he was speaking to me. And tried to get him to sign, you know, paperwork, basically recanting. And tried to get him to say who the other X employees were who were talking to me. And from that point on, Tyler's life became a nightmare. He had to, you know, get his own legal representations.

41:39His parents were almost bankrupted by the legal fees. He spent that summer sleeping with a knife under his pillow. He was afraid for his life. And, you know, she went, when I say she went after him, I'm not exaggerating. I mean, this was a ruthless cover-up, a ruthless attempt to prevent the truth from coming out. We're talking legal threats, intimidation. I know she tried to get Rupert Murdoch, even, to shut down the Wall Street Journal investigation.

42:10That's right. She appealed to Murdoch. There was a point in, I think it was September 2015, we were about less than a month from publishing the story where she showed up in New York and took the elevator. I think it was the eighth floor at the time where Murdoch had his office and went to visit him there. Of course, you know, she had access because Murdoch had invested in Theranos. He was actually, unbeknownst to me at the time, he was Theranos' single biggest investor. He had put in $125 million.

42:42So she went to see him in the newscorp building, three floors up from where I was in the newsroom, and appealed to him to kill the story. Yeah. Let me get to another viewer question. The movie is constructed around encounters that Nathan Fielder has with Elizabeth Holmes. And in the movie, at least the first half, he's living in this beach house with her. And he's sort of trying to figure out, you know, who she is in some sense, whether she really believes what she's saying. And she, both intentionally and maybe inadvertently, tries to defend herself.

43:15One of her defenses, which comes up in the film on a few occasions, is that she was misled or framed by her boyfriend, Sonny Balwani, the chief operating officer. I have a question from a Twitter user named Mark B. Devil's Advocate, is it possible that it was all Sonny? I'm genuinely asking. What do you say, John? No way. I mean, Sonny absolutely had a hand in this, but they ran this company as a couple. And probably the best way to understand that is to go and look at their texts.

43:47The government pulled, you know, thousands of their texts spanning a number of years, I think, essentially from when he joined Theranos in 2009 to 2015, 2016. And when you read those texts, you get the picture of a couple running this company together. They're checking in with each other all the time. They're doing everything together. And, you know, you could certainly accuse Sonny of being a bad influence on her.

44:24You could also make the case that she was a bad influence on Sonny. But the notion that she wasn't involved is farcical. Yeah. And I would argue that the blame should be on her even a little bit more than on Sonny because she was CEO. Right. She was chairman of the board. She had voting rights that gave her, you know, something like 90% voting control of the company.

44:55She was at the controls of this thing. Right. And she was piloting the cover-up. Yeah. Another defense that comes up in the movie is the idea that she'd never quite lied but had merely miscommunicated or sort of communicated incorrectly. Was that a familiar defense to you? Is that something that she had talked about before or used at trial? I'm thinking specifically of this scene. We've already touched on it where she brings out the Edison. She brings out the Minilab. Right. That's the problem. She doesn't bring out the Edison. She brings out the Minilab. And she effectively says that when she says this machine can do something, she doesn't mean it literally can do it but sort of in some hypothetical way someday could do it or something like that.

45:35Yeah. Was that a familiar defense to you? I mean, I think it's one of, you know, a panoply of defenses that she's used. I can't remember if she used it at the trial or not. But the bottom line is the Minilab couldn't do anything. The Minilab, I don't think the Minilab had a single test ever validated on it. You know, using the word can and the whole debate, the back and forth they have over the meaning of the word can, it's kind of besides the point.

46:10That machine couldn't do anything.

Decoding the Abbott and Costello scene

46:11Yeah. What did you make of the Abbott and Costello scene? This is another sort of pivotal scene in the movie where Nathan shows her who's on the classic Abbott and Costello routine, who's on first. And he tries to get her to talk about what's funny about it. And she says that she doesn't, she says, oh, I find it funny. But then she can't figure out, she's unable to answer the question, what's the name of the first baseman, which is obviously the whole premise of the joke. Do you think it's possible that she actually didn't understand? I think she understood it and that she was playing dumb.

46:45And the reason for that is that there was a sequence, it was either the sequence immediately before that one or the one before, where, you know, they're sitting at the dining room table in the beach bungalow in San Diego. And the pieces of the Theranos device are, you know, laid out in front of them and Fielder floats the notion that she just interacts with the world differently. She sees the world differently and that perhaps, you know, that explains why, you know, statements that she felt were innocent were interpreted by investors and others, doctors, patients as lies.

47:24And so my interpretation is that she felt that playing dumb about the Abbott and Costello routine in the next sequence would further that narrative that she's, you know, this neurodivergent, autistic entrepreneur who functions on a different wavelength. She's very calculating and her calculus was behaving this way helps me. Yeah. And it helps this narrative that Fielder himself floated.

47:55And so therefore, that's what I'm going to go with now. What makes you so sure of the calculation that's going on there? Because I've seen her be calculating for years now about in a bunch of different situations, you know, in the way she responded to questions when she was interviewed for three days in a row by the SEC. I saw her testify on her own behalf at the trial. I saw how she responded to my stories back in late 2015.

48:26There was one incredibly telling moment, which was when she came to the Wall Street Journal's tech conference about 10 days after my first front page story was published. And, you know, she came out swinging and she said some bald-faced lies in that appearance and she knew exactly what she was doing. Right. So you put no stock in what sort of the Fielder argument that like, oh, maybe she sees the world differently and we should, I don't know what, we should give her a little bit of space for this kind of different, you know, sense of the world.

48:59I mostly don't buy that, no. I think that for the most part, she knew exactly what she was doing when she was Theranos' CEO. Yeah. That she knew she was telling major lies. Yeah. And I just really don't buy that interpretation. When you say for the most part, though, is there stuff you feel like really just, you could just chalk up to her being weird, for lack of a better word? This is the nuance. The nuance is I don't think she dropped out of Stanford as a sophomore with a plan to go and con the world, to go and con investors and doctors and patients.

49:34I think she really did want to found a company. She really did want to walk in the footsteps of Steve Jobs. She really did want to become a world-renowned, successful entrepreneur. And she thought and hoped that her idea would work. And I think what happened is in the years thereafter, she began cutting corners and telling lies when she needed to. And then where it really became a full-fledged fraud is in fall of 2013 when they go live with the blood tests in Walgreens stores and they're absolutely not ready.

50:06They have, you know, an Edison machine that can do only a few tests and can't do them well. And they go and they hack these Siemens machines and they use, you know, finger stink samples on these Siemens machines. They pre-dilute them in order to make the samples big enough so that they'll actually run on these Siemens machines. And that's problematic because the protocol, once you put the sample on the Siemens machines, it already dilutes the sample.

50:37So then you're double diluting the sample, which can cause, you know, accuracy issues. And the bottom line is you're not using your own technology. You're using a German, a hundred-year-old German conglomerates machines that you're slightly modifying. And that's so, you know, I would date the moment where it becomes a giant fraud to the fall of 2013. But, you know, did she hope to succeed in earlier years? Yes. It wasn't all a fraud from the beginning.

51:08Yeah. Let me ask a question from Twitter. This is from a user called Inquisitive Mind. Do you have any basic human sympathy for her? You reframe to her victims, and I understand that, but this is a woman who's been through some rough things. Yes. I have sympathy for her. I think the U.S. justice system is really harsh. The U.S. criminal system is harsh. She got 11 years and three months, I think her sentence was.

51:39And, you know, that's a pretty heavy sentence, perhaps out of whack with the crime. I also felt sympathy for her, you know, seeing her in that bungalow with the kids, juggling the kids. There's a scene that I felt was very genuine where I felt for her when Fielder is talking to Billy, and she's in the foreground talking to her lawyers on the phone about what prison is going to be like.

52:10Yeah. And you see her gradually break down in tears, and I think those tears were very genuine, and I felt bad for her then. Yeah. It's one of the remarkable things about the movie is it's a sort of portrait that I don't think is—it doesn't—it generates sympathy without removing any of the sort of damning parts of what happened and why you would expect her to be in jail, I suppose. I do want to ask about Billy. I have a question from Ryan Parks on Twitter. Do you think the husband is a mark or opportunist?

52:42I think he's both. Yeah. I think she is using him. I mean, you can't tell me it's a coincidence that the first guy she dates seriously gets together with after the Theranos scandal has blown up and basically made her this notorious conwoman. You can't tell me it's a coincidence that it's a very rich heir. Yeah. Um, I think he's also an opportunist because you get the sense as you watch the film that he wants to capitalize on this opportunity.

53:21Um, there are parts of him that are, you know, outraged by what she's gone through because he feels she's innocent. Um, there's, you know, there are parts of him who love her and feel empathy for her, but there's also a part of him I feel confident in saying that does see an opportunity. Yeah. Um, for his own, you know, career for, um, you know, they were hoping to make money off the film. Right. They were hoping to rehabilitate her image.

53:52Um, he's definitely an opportunist. Yeah. I mean, that's, it seems like one of the major themes of the second half of the movie is the many ways that he's found opportunity, even as she's in prison, to make use of her image and, and, uh, yeah. I mean, the digital replica, that right there is, um, it feels exploitative. Yeah. Yeah. Um, one question we got, uh, one response we got to the episode we recorded last week was a sort of question about why, why should we still care about Elizabeth Holmes? I'm going to, I'm going to read a comment, a sort of representative comment from Matt on the Times site.

54:25Uh, why can no one look away from Elizabeth Holmes? Because the media keeps throwing stories about her at me. Every time I see a headline, my first reaction is, who is this person again? And my second is, why are we still talking about her? So we talked a little last week about why Elizabeth Holmes is a fascinating cultural figure. Um, and you, in fact, wrote a great piece on the subject too, that's available, uh, in the Times app. But I'm also wondering if you think we should stop talking about her? Like, is there a case, what is the case for her continued relevance as a news story? First of all, I'll remind everyone, why are we talking about her?

54:57We're talking about her because she invited these filmmakers into her home 34 days before going to prison to try to basically, um, retell the story, rewrite history, and have people feel sorry for her. Um, that's why we're talking about her. She did this. She's the one who made this moment happen. And, you know, I suspect that it hasn't panned out exactly the way she hoped. Sure. Because I do think this film is damning in its own way.

55:28It's a terrific movie. It's a terrific piece of art. But I think it really doesn't make her or Billy look good. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I keep coming back to the fact that she's the one who is making us talk about her. Mm-hmm. Um, she's the one who's not going away.

Refusing to take responsibility

55:46Yeah. Okay, let me ask one final question. Uh, this is also from Corey O'Neill on Twitter. Corey writes, Again, I don't buy the narrative that she doesn't know that she lied and that she doesn't know that she did wrong.

56:18I think she does. Mm-hmm. But she's continuing, yes, to put on the act that she didn't do anything wrong and that whether or not you believe that she did or not, that she doesn't believe she did anything wrong. Yeah. I think Judge Davila was incredibly wise when he made that statement during her sentencing because this is someone who had many, many, many opportunities to take responsibility or take partial responsibility or show contrition. And admit, you know, that she could have done things differently.

56:55Feel sorry for the patients whose lives she impacted. Employees, doctors, investors, she never once did that. Mm-hmm. And, uh, so I actually wrote that quote down. I was at her sentencing hearing. And when Davila uttered those words, I wrote the quote down verbatim in my notebook. And then I used it in the epilogue I wrote for the book. I wrote an epilogue after the sentencing hearing, a long one, chapter length.

57:26And I used that Davila quote because I thought it was, it really encapsulated her mind and her psychology and her just refusal to take responsibility. Well, that's a great note to end on. John, thank you for joining us again. I have to recommend Hard Fork listeners, our audience, read Bad Blood if you've seen this movie. If you haven't seen this movie, it's a great work of journalism, a great work of nonfiction. And thanks again for coming on. Thanks for having me. We'll see you next time.

58:24As always, we love to hear from our audience. If you have any questions or suggestions or want to give us a piece of your mind, find us in the comments at nytimes.com slash hardfork. You can also email us hardfork at nytimes.com.

58:54We'll see you next time.