Key Takeaways

  • Katie Drummond, Global Editorial Director at Wired, admits the publication ran one of the earliest Elizabeth Holmes profiles and “largely laundered her lies” during the 2010s tech boom.
  • Holmes's partner, Billy Evans, negotiated a backend profit cut on Nathan Fielder's documentary “You Can See Everything” before dropping the deal when he realized how bad it looked.
  • Drummond admitted that watching the documentary initially triggered sympathy for Holmes as a mother heading to prison, showing how charismatic figures manipulate public framing.
  • John Coogan argues Theranos collapsed because of "total slop" in basic operational execution rather than impossible diagnostic biology.

Documentaries Can Turn Clear Fraud Into Sympathy

Nathan Fielder's documentary "You Can See Everything" revisits Elizabeth Holmes as she faces federal prison. Even seasoned tech reporters can get pulled into the drama. Katie Drummond, Global Editorial Director at Wired, watched the film twice and noticed how easily her own perception shifted during the first viewing.

“I've seen it twice, and the first time I saw it, I felt so much empathy for her,” Drummond said. “I remember sitting there being like, 'This woman has kids. She's going to prison. I feel like she's being manipulated by these men in her life.'”

The film reveals that behind the scenes, the calculations never stopped. Jordi Hays pointed out that Holmes's partner, Billy Evans, negotiated a contract to secure a percentage of backend movie profits. Evans only backed out after production wrapped, once he realized how damaging the financial arrangement would look to the public.

This transactional posture fits right into the tech media environment of the 2010s. Drummond acknowledged that tech publications bore direct responsibility for creating the myth in the first place. “We published one of the first ever interviews with her in Wired, and we largely laundered her lies,” Drummond admitted. Founders learned they could trade high-minded rhetoric for fawning press coverage. “I still think that startup founders sell a vision and they often tell tall tales to get that vision sold. I think she did it to the nth degree and she did it in an era where that was so much more commonplace and there was so much willingness even among the tech press to really lift those people up and celebrate them.”

Theranos Failed on Basic Operations Rather Than Science

The standard post-mortem on Theranos treats microfluidics and blood testing as an impossible technical trap. John Coogan rejects that defense entirely. He argues that the collapse stemmed from executive failure inside the company rather than insurmountable medical science.

“Put aside the fraud,” Coogan said. “Like it just seems like total slop in terms of the execution of that business and gives me absolutely no faith in a Theranos 2.0.”

The 2010s spawned a generation of TED talk entrepreneurs who treated stage presence as a substitute for running a company. Theranos ran broken lab processes, faked quality checks, and botched partner rollouts with Walgreens. Those failures were managerial choices, not scientific dead ends. The core failure of Theranos was that leadership spent their energy polishing an external halo while day-to-day work decayed into chaos. A founder who relies on stagecraft eventually faces the math of the factory floor. When basic operations disintegrate, no amount of press goodwill or charismatic storytelling can save the company.

What to Do With This

Audit your current deck and investor updates for operational slop this week. Take your top product milestone and review the raw log data behind it with your technical lead. If you find a gap between the number you promised your board and the number your code produced yesterday, kill the slide and report the real metric.