Engineer Creates Interactive Elizabeth Holmes Desk Simulator From Trial Documents

A Digital Time Capsule of Theranos's Peak

Extend engineer Bo Lau has built an unusually detailed website that allows visitors to inhabit Elizabeth Holmes's workspace during the height of Theranos, reconstructed from over a thousand emails, slides, texts, and documents that surfaced as court exhibits during her criminal trial. The simulation transports users back to 2016, complete with period-accurate technology: iPhones still featured home buttons that required finger swipes to unlock, and the simulated MacBook Air runs OS X El Capitan. This temporal specificity creates an immersive window into the operations of the blood-testing startup before its collapse.

The interactive environment lets users explore actual trial exhibits displayed on Holmes's iPhone and laptop screens within the simulation. Visitors can even operate a virtual Theranos Edison machine, the notoriously failed device that the company claimed could extract comprehensive health data from a single drop of blood. The project transforms what would otherwise be an arduous task of manually sourcing thousands of PDFs from court archives into an engaging, navigable experience that feels almost like peeking into someone's actual workspace.

Marketing Tool Meets Historical Document

While the Holmes desk simulator appears designed primarily as an entertaining novelty, it serves multiple strategic purposes. Lau's company is using it to promote a watch party for Nathan Fielder's upcoming documentary about Holmes titled "You Can See Everything." More broadly, the project functions as promotional material for Extend itself, a B2B software company that specializes in parsing, extracting, and splitting complex documents with what it claims is exceptional accuracy. The desk simulator effectively demonstrates the company's document-handling capabilities to a tech-savvy audience.

The project gains additional resonance from the public nature of the trial's discovery process, which made all these materials available through the American legal system. Rather than creating new content, Lau leveraged authentic court documents to construct what amounts to a digital museum exhibit centered on one of technology's most infamous cautionary tales. The accessibility and navigability of this format represents a significant improvement over traditional legal document research, making an important case study in startup failure more widely accessible to general audiences.