Tyler Shultz, the former Theranos employee who helped expose the company’s fraudulent practices, said he was shocked by the portrayal of Elizabeth Holmes in a new documentary and accused her of misleading its director about the blood-testing device at the centre of the scandal.
Speaking on Monday, Mr Shultz said the Holmes he knew had been a highly confident executive capable of dominating rooms filled with senior government officials, generals and senators. Her appearance in You Can See Everything, he said, was “almost unrecognisable”.
“The Elizabeth that I knew completely commanded a room,” Mr Shultz said. “She had so much confidence, and the woman that I saw onscreen looked, frankly, like a, a broken woman.”
The documentary, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, takes viewers inside Holmes’s rented property in San Diego in 2023, shortly before she began an 11-year prison sentence. Holmes is shown living there with her partner, Billy Evans, and their two children.
At one point, Holmes produces what she says is the Theranos blood-testing device and places it on a table alongside its components. Mr Shultz said the equipment shown was not the machine he had worked with at the company.
“That was not the device that I worked with 12 hours a day,” he said. “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.”
He added that Holmes had “completely misled” Mr Fielder and sent him “down this completely different rabbit hole”.
Theranos whistleblower criticises Holmes documentary account
Holmes has never admitted wrongdoing over the Theranos scandal and maintained that position in the documentary. She was convicted in 2022 on multiple counts of defrauding investors, who had been led to believe that the company could carry out extensive clinical tests using only a small blood sample taken from a finger.
The technology was promoted as a major advance in diagnostics, but Theranos ultimately failed to deliver what it had claimed. Holmes, once presented as a symbol of Silicon Valley’s promise, became the focus of widespread scrutiny as the company collapsed.
“She knows that she did something wrong,” Mr Shultz said. “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.”
Mr Shultz joined Theranos as an intern in 2013. His grandfather, former US secretary of state George Shultz, was a member of the company’s board. Tyler Shultz left the business the following year and later provided information for investigations by The Wall Street Journal and government regulatory agencies.
He also appeared in the 2016 documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, which examined the downfall of Theranos.
You Can See Everything opened on Friday and took $15 million at the box office during its first weekend, making it the second most profitable opening weekend for a documentary.
