Silicon Valley Can't Stop Watching the Elizabeth Holmes Documentary — And That's Deeply Ironic

A documentary about Elizabeth Holmes — the Theranos founder convicted of defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars — has become the unlikely social event of the season for the very tech industry she embarrassed. Venture capital funds are bringing their portfolio founders to screenings. Startup teams are hosting Luma events. AI companies are sponsoring theater nights across New York and San Francisco.

The documentary, 'You Can See Everything,' is directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, and covers Holmes alongside her fiancé Billy Evans. When Extend, an AI documentation startup, hosted a Thursday screening at AMC Lincoln Square in New York, the event drew 1,400 RSVPs for roughly 120 seats. The organizer, Bo Lau — who works in developer relations and recently moved to New York — started it simply because she didn't want to watch it alone, posted on X, and turned it into a work event she could expense. She's now flying to San Francisco for a repeat.

The crowd was mostly in their 20s — young enough to have missed the real-time collapse of Theranos — chatting about AI products and remote work policies before the lights dimmed. Inside the theater, the tech audience laughed at Fielder's signature awkward humor and Holmes' peculiarities, but barely reacted to a pivotal scene involving an AI replica of Holmes built by her fiancé after her imprisonment. One attendee speculated that AI replicas are simply old news to this crowd. The reveal of who's actually running Holmes' X account, however, drew audible gasps — fitting for an audience that discovered the screening through that same platform.

The central tension is hard to ignore: Holmes is the canonical cautionary tale about Silicon Valley's culture of overselling visions and deceiving investors, yet today's AI founders speak in similarly grandiose terms about world-changing technology. When pressed on why the tech crowd is so comfortable laughing at her, attendees offered a revealing answer — Holmes has been so thoroughly processed by media (books, a Hulu series, tabloid coverage) that she no longer feels like a product of their industry. She's been transformed, one attendee said flatly, into a meme. Holmes herself still maintains her innocence, and her active X account even responded approvingly to a fan-built simulator of her desk.