r/technology 15h ago

Business A secret new Elizabeth Holmes documentary stuns Telluride

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/07/a-secret-new-elizabeth-holmes-documentary-stuns-telluride/
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762 comments sorted by

u/Still_Finance7478 14h ago

Nathan Fielder directing an Elizabeth Holmes doc is the collision of the two greatest method actors of our generation.

u/EONS 13h ago

Hold on.

The Blonde in the trailer for whatever new Nathan Fielder thing is her? And she agreed to do a "documentary" or allow footage filmed with him in that form?

How incapable of.being in touch with reality does a person in her position have yo be, to agree to this.

Jesus fucking shit hahahahaha I cant wait for the cringe

EDIT: oh my god. She.... is a sociopath but like, extremely robot impersonator sociopath

u/joe5joe7 13h ago

Apparently Holmes was practicing 'radical transparency' to try to fix her image. This is going to be insane

u/pizza_the_mutt 11h ago

She checked out this trailer and thought "Wow I killed it. So relatable and authentic."

u/BeastofBurden 13h ago

And the footage for the documentary was taken just weeks before she went to prison.

u/boot2skull 12h ago

I would like to personally venture capital fund my ticket presale please.

u/LyqwidBred 9h ago

I don’t want to read your business plan, just tell me how much money I will make.

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u/w00t4me 12h ago

She reached out to them 34 days before she went to prison, and they almost immediately started filming, and apparently have been filming with her for over 3 years after that as well

u/impy695 10h ago

Wait, she asked HIM?!?

I was imagining a scenario where it was an idea Nathan had and everyone said not even he could pull it off, so he did it just to prove them wrong

u/daddy_tops 10h ago

Maybe she was planning to start another business in prison and needed his knowledge to help her make it in this competitive world

u/ilikedhorsebot3000 9h ago

She heard he graduated from business school with really good grades

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u/pantstoaknifefight2 9h ago

Hear me out. We synthesize in a lab the taste of excrement and make it a frozen yogurt flavor. People will never stop talking about it. There's no such thing as bad publicity.

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u/whatsbobgonnado 12h ago

fascinating 

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u/dtwhitecp 11h ago

on one hand, she picked the absolute worst person to help her do that. On the other hand, maybe she picked the absolute best person?

u/brogflender 4h ago

Oh. Nathan absolutely will dismantle her. 

But along the way it’ll actually be about all of us. 

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u/DangKilla 11h ago

Seems extremely manipulative to be rocking a baby during that interview. She had the "Silicon Flu" in away, much like the mafia suddenly got the Sicilian flu and were "weak and feeble" in court.

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u/Apprehensive_Rice19 12h ago

You can only practice radical transparency if youve ALWAYS been radically transparent, not just when you get caught in a lie, Elizabeth!

u/Frito_Pendejo_ 12h ago

Hell, her Onlyfans site gonna be lit....

u/whatsbobgonnado 12h ago

worked for rachel dolezal¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ ͡⁠°⁠ ͜⁠ʖ⁠ ͡⁠°⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

u/A_Feast_For_Trolls 11h ago

Wait, you for real?

u/whatsbobgonnado 9h ago

I would never joke about rachel dolezal spreading her bootyhole next to a zora neal hurston book

u/the_unknown_garden 9h ago

That's a hell of a brand new sentence.

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u/whatsbobgonnado 12h ago

I'd like to see the tommy talarico version of that

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u/Kaldricus 13h ago

She didn't just agree to it, she reached out to arrange it

u/meowingtrashcan 13h ago

I love the thought that she was just sitting around waiting for prison, watched the episode of Nathan for You where he forms the exorcist realty company, and picked up the phone

u/finalremix 12h ago

It was probably the episode with the alligator TV price-matching. She realized his business acumen.

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u/Garchompisbestboi 12h ago

I wouldn't be surprised if it's another scheme to try and lower her sentence. I learned yesterday after the trailer dropped that she already managed to convince a judge to remove one year from her sentence so far.

u/UFmoose 12h ago

Funny. I learned the same at the same time.

u/Garchompisbestboi 12h ago

I'm one of those enlightened cinephiles who prefers to read the wikipedia page rather than waiting to watch the film in question 🤓

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u/Mizmodigg 11h ago

I watched the trailer not knowing anything but the title. I thought it was a new horror movie. I genuinely expected her to be an evil robot. I was so confused🤯

Googling after and finding out she is a real person somehow didn't put me at ease.😬

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u/citrusco 13h ago

Honestly I’m glad to see someone else initially thought that was an actress in the trailer. I read through dozens of comments to understand in my mind that this was essentially an A24 lit movie FEATURING HER in the flesh. Collision of worlds indeed. Saw the Hulu series, read the book, and remember vividly the rapid rise and downfall of the company.

u/Rarelyimportant 12h ago

Yeah, she looks older than I thought she would and her voice even more deep. I thought at first maybe it was AI. Then I thought maybe it's an actress. Even the wikipedia page I questioning because I know Nathan Fielder is involved, and he graduated from one of Canada's top business universities with really good grades. But it seems like she's just that out of touch that she thought it was a good idea. Which is fairness, it was a GREAT idea, but not for her.

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u/goodolarchie 12h ago

You know how serial killers want to be caught decades later? It kinda feels like that. They just can't be complete as sociopaths / psychopaths unless they captivate us.

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u/Wazula23 13h ago

The trailer is scarier than any horror trailer I've seen this year

u/beekersavant 10h ago

Her face in that scene. Are her eyes always like that? because past photgraphers have done some hard work to hide those in pics.

Some venture capitalists probably: "She got those cold soulless eyes that could make you some tea or chase you through a forest with an axe. She'd smile and think both actions were great the whole time."

"I know. It chills me to my core. She's perfect! Give her all the money."

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u/TurkeyPits 13h ago

Truly an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object

u/harmfuldischarge 13h ago

I'm so fkng locked in man. I am red in the face waiting of rit to come out. Holy shit am I excited

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u/casualfrog68 15h ago

"I'm engaging with you like a human being."

That's something someone would say to convince you they are actually human when they are not.

This person ruined venture capital funding for diagnostics for several years, setting back cancer and other disease detection.

u/TheGrandExquisitor 14h ago

And she started a new company. From prison.  That is selling the exact same thing Theranos sold. 

I kid you not. 

u/JohnnyBeeGaming 12h ago

They'll have to do a study on any investors dumb enough to invest.

u/Bored_Amalgamation 11h ago

Tbf, if you asked any scientist in biomed research that uses blood, they would e laughed at you for investing in Theranos. It was BS from the beginning. It just shows the level of hubris this billionaire investment funds managed to accumulate. The ego and incompetence... On so many levels.

u/Underrated_Dinker 10h ago edited 10h ago

Wikipedia:

she succeeded in getting her advisor and dean at the School of Engineering, Channing Robertson, to back her idea.

In 2003, Holmes renamed the company Theranos (a portmanteau of "therapy" and "diagnosis"). The company's original name, "Real-Time Cures", was changed after deciding that too many people were skeptical of the word "cure".

Robertson became the company's first board member and introduced Holmes to venture capitalists.

Maybe I don't understand how this all works, but why is this guy not getting more flack? He was a grown adult promoting a 19 year old's business idea.

He's still just a professor at Stanford.

I've only read closer about Theranos in the last few days. Noticed this on her wikipedia page

u/PeachMan- 10h ago

Yeah and she paid him half a million per year.....not sure how he got away clean

u/Underrated_Dinker 10h ago

Like having the Dean of the engineering school at Stanford back your idea is a huge difference maker. How many people wouldn't have looked twice at her idea if he hadn't supported it? How is the dean of engineering so stupid to not see that her idea was bogus? I get it, she's an adult and it's her name on the papers but still..

I can't wait for this movie.

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u/MarcusXL 10h ago

"Real-Time Cures" sounds like a sketchy holistic 'medicine' store you'd see in a strip-mall next to an off-brand dollar store.

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u/Sens1r 6h ago

I can recommend Bad Blood by John Carreyrou to anyone looking to deep dive on this, the story of what happeend really is just nonsense from beginning to end. A few people tried to blow the whistle on this but they were just silenced and ridiculed, the media found their darling and investors wanted to ride the bullshit all the way to a potential payday.

u/babyfeet1 10h ago

You make a great point re Channing Robertson. It’s a memorable name.

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u/EllisDee_4Doyin 11h ago

I knew literally nothing about biomedical stuff, and yet when I read about theranos for the first time, just from getting blood drawn for checkups, I thought "I'm not sure how that would be enough to accomplish anything" .  

I have used a titration machine for things related to my field (civil engineering), and the smallest amount to get any reasonable result was 10 ml.  But I read on to see what their design looks like because maybe there's something I missed. 

u/brianwski 9h ago

just from getting blood drawn for checkups ... "I'm not sure how that would be enough to accomplish anything"

For 20 years I tested my INR with a drop of blood and a little battery operated machine the size of a fat cell phone in my own home. INR is an indication of how fast your blood clots, then I took different amounts of the drug coumadin based on those single blood droplet results. Luckily the newer drugs (like Xarelto) for my genetic condition just "work" with the same dose given to anybody (like a lot of other meds work for a lot of conditions) and I don't have to do finger prick tests anymore.

Now this is super interesting: to judge how accurate my home testing was, I would test my INR in my car in the hospital parking lot, then walk directly in and have a full test tube of blood drawn so a lab could do it also the most accurate way. My home droplet of blood test was close enough to the official lab results (maybe within 5%) to be useful for me to control my medication. (Too little coumadin and it didn't have the life saving effect, too much coumadin and I bled to death internally leaking blood everywhere including my eyes, nose, and mouth.)

That implies all sorts of things to me: first of all, obviously some tests can give fairly accurate results using 1 drop of blood. This should also be obvious to anybody that has seen a diabetic test their blood sugar themselves. Not all tests work with a droplet of blood, but some do.

It also implies you want to have the more accurate test done every once in a while to make sure your home equipment is working. It doesn't mean the drop of blood test is "useless", it just means maybe it is required to be periodically checked with a full blood draw.

When the Holmes/Theranos thing is brought up, people will start claiming adamantly that "1 drop is never enough for any test", and I believe that is too extreme (too binary). Doctors TOLD me to use the home testing machine, and I double checked it every 6 months and found it to be reasonably useful. Doctors highly recommend diabetics test themselves with droplets of blood. This isn't controversial in the medical community.

Where I think Holmes and Theranos screwed up was trying to force every test to use 1 drop of blood "right away this year", even though some of the tests currently required more blood to get meaningful results. I think Holmes should be in jail for this.

What would have been amazing, and a win for humanity, is if Theranos had restricted the tests to only tests that worked with a drop of blood. Then, over time, try to develop more tests to work with a drop of blood. But don't use those full test tube tests on people in the real world until that test works with a drop of blood. This would have some good, moral effects like lowering healthcare costs a bit, and maybe even save some lives (getting diagnosed early due to ease and lowered cost of testing).

Somebody above me said it "ruined funding for diagnostics for several years". I totally agree. Along the way, we convinced everybody that no medical test can ever be done without a full standard test tube of blood, and no scientist should even attempt it. It set this area of medicine back a decade or more for sure, just from the visceral reaction people have to a specific dishonest company: Theranos. Holmes/Theranos really ruined a perfectly valid pursuit of one area of science.

u/BioMed-R 8h ago

A part of what made Theranos claims so phony were that they were claiming to be able to perform hundreds of analyses on a single drop of blood. Not one per drop.

Hemoglobin and glucose are often analyzed on a single drop of blood but those are the only ones I’ve seen, besides some microbiological analyses.

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u/wolf_at_the_door1 11h ago

They’re dumb enough to keep pumping into AI. We’re in the Don’t Look Up era.

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u/Prunkle 10h ago

Jesus Christ. I just looked it up and if you're talking about Haemanthus then technically her partner owns it and she has "no formal role" in the business. But that sounds like a whole lot of horse shit to me.

The npr article I read quoted the company saying, "This is not Theranos 2.0“ 😂😂😂

Absolutely. Wild.

u/VeryBerryBluu 9h ago

“This is not Theranos 2.0. See? It has a little hat. Clearly different!” 🤣

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u/DissKhorse 14h ago

Sounds like something Mark Zuckerberg would say before his two pronged tongue moistened his eyeball.

u/fearless_egg1050 13h ago

I both applaud and hate you for this visual

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u/Ill_Following_7022 15h ago

Something a sociopath or an LLM would say.

u/casualfrog68 15h ago

And that was a nice house she had there. She should have nothing. When she gets out of prison, she should be homeless.

u/Violoner 15h ago

Elizabeth Holmeless

u/CarlySimonSays 14h ago

I think she married a very wealthy man fairly recently; she then had two children with him before her incarceration.

u/Ssided 14h ago

These people never end up poor unless they develop some insane addiction. And even then...

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u/Count_Backwards 14h ago

Because she was trying for the "you can't put me in prison, I'm a mother" appeal

u/agha0013 13h ago

imagine growing up knowing your mom only had you as a last ditch effort to stay out of prison...

u/Capt_Kilgore 13h ago

Imagine being 12 years old and your mom is finally getting out of prison. It’s some awful shit she continues to intentionally do.

I am confident she regrets nothing about Theranos and only sees herself as victim.

u/AnitaSammich 12h ago

Her eyes are so dark, no doubt they match her soul.

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u/Disastrous-Milk7804 13h ago

I never heard of that as a defense to avoid incarceration. you learn something new every day.

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u/Kriegerian 14h ago

Trying to stay out of jail, no doubt.

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u/minetey 14h ago

Elizabeth Holmes or the person you're replying to? Both. It's both.

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u/RandoScando 15h ago

I completely agree with you. (Also something and AI would say when you’ve said the dumbest thing in the history of human experience, but claimed it to be true)

u/Ill_Following_7022 15h ago

Usually Claude tells me to take a deep breath. 🫪

u/RyanBordello 14h ago

Grok keeps sending me lewd images I didn't ask for

u/9-11GaveMe5G 14h ago

grok statistically "knows" what it's users want

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u/HarlanCedeno 14h ago

I'm guessing she's still considers herself a persecuted "disruptor".

u/casualfrog68 14h ago

It doesn't matter what a monster considers itself.

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u/zleuth 14h ago

Yeah, a lot of negatives. But she did defraud Henry Kissinger, so not all bad.

u/bobsmeds 14h ago

I was once in an elevator with Henry Kissinger. He was with a tall thin bird like lady wearing all black with black plumes coming off her shoulders. It was the night Steve Jobs died. I found out he died right after I got out of the elevator. That being said I can't wait to see this movie lol

u/nickcash 13h ago

Nothing about this story was relevant whatsoever but it painted such a vivid picture I couldn't help but appreciate it.

u/Rokketeer 12h ago

Bro blessed us with an interesting premise for a scene then fucked off without elaborating. Beautiful Reddit comment, 10/10, no notes.

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u/RJ815 8h ago

"It was a dark, rainy night. The ash of my cigarette was crumbling onto the floor of the balcony. I could hear the neighbor's kids screaming about something. I turned on the TV and heard Steve Jobs died."

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u/strolls 11h ago

I once met Henry Kissinger at a courtroom in The Hague. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything. He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?” I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my filings, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to settle with the clerk I saw him trying to walk out the doors without his guards.

The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need a verdict first.” He kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and went back to his cell.

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u/wendyschickennugget 15h ago

Pretty fitting that Emma Stone is producing given the plot of Bugonia.

u/CarlySimonSays 14h ago

Well, and she did a tv show with the director fairly recently.

u/TheGrandExquisitor 14h ago

That was a brilliant show. The ending was....crazy. 

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u/honeybadgercantcare 13h ago

I work in small med device (like, our company is 7 people, we typically go after diseases or issues with small populations that large companies see no shareholder value in and therefore don't develop drugs or devices for). It's completely ruined almost all our funding avenues (along with the current administration because there used to be grants for them but there aren't any more because that would be DEI).

u/Bored_Amalgamation 11h ago

I'm in biomed research, and we just recently sold to PE. the COVID funding spout cutting off is what sunk a lot of smaller places.

u/primalprincess 13h ago

She also created a lot of stigma for female founders in biotech

u/jsuispeach 13h ago

Female founders in all of tech. The difference between how investors treat male-led vs. female-led start ups got so much worse after Theranos. Not that it was great to begin with...

u/primalprincess 13h ago

100%, you are right, it was for the whole industry. Holmes was doing soooo much PR, more than any female founder ever had and she had such a massive downfall

u/boomgoon 14h ago

Its crazy how she looks just like AI used to portray people. She might just be the first true AI, hallucinating and lying about technology and doubling down at every turn, apologizing then doubling down again. The crazy facial expressions of exaggerated human features. I wonder if her finger count changes often during the length of this documentary and in real life.

u/orthaeus 14h ago

She has extremely uncanny valley face.

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u/heresyforfunnprofit 13h ago

Zuck was first.

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u/q_eyeroll 14h ago

That would be because she is an actual psychopath.

u/sierra-soul 13h ago

All the blame on her and none for the venture capitalist morons who fell for this shit. Don't ever let rich people think they're smarter than you. They're just lucky.

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u/MyCatIsLenin 15h ago

Depending venture capital to fund research is the problem. That's not how a functional society works, but one filled completely parasitic actors. 

u/vezwyx 14h ago

This is the immediate problem, but it's only a symptom of the much larger systemic issue of the American government slowly becoming an apparatus for the elite

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u/sometimelater0212 13h ago

Hmmm… I’m not so sure she was forthcoming about what she was doing given the members of the board backgrounds and how they funded it for more than a decade with copious cash and no products. That’s the problem with this whole thing: no one knows what the truth is and it certainly not gonna come from her. The fact that she let Nathan Fielder do a movie on her is really fucking bizarre. He’s known for creating these awkward moments. Unless he’s in on it because part of the problem with Nathan Fielder himself is it’s very hard to tell the difference between fact and documentary versus acting. Who’s taking whom for a ride?

u/StrongAd8487 13h ago

Disagree. The venture capitalists let themselves be had. The whole story was incredulous from the start. Anyone who invested did not do any scientific due diligence , or if they did, just went phuk it, I can make money. All on them, not her

u/hajenso 12h ago

The story was incredible. The investors should have been incredulous.

u/JenniferMel13 10h ago

I think the CEO of Walgreens should be sitting in jail next to Holmes. He ran a freaken pharmacy company. He should have had a basic inkling that her product didn’t meant the bare FDA requirements for use on patients.

She targeted people who didn’t know enough to ask any real questions and would let their FOMO win out over hiring someone who could ask real questions to advise them. They deserve to lose their money for that very reason.

u/minetey 15h ago

Lol. I surely lament the state of diagnostics. I have only had 3 unnecessary tests done this year at 3000% of their cost to my insurance. Potential CEOs could have bought hundreds of second homes without the awareness of the average American patient by now.

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u/rutegar 15h ago

She is a terrifying person and a master manipulator. I hope this monster serves 100% of her ridiculously light sentence. Lots of folks either falsely believed they had a cancer diagnosis because of her, or worse and were told they did not have cancer when they really did. She ruined a lot of lives.

u/starmartyr 15h ago

It's worse than that. Theranos was making claims about what their tech could do that prevented real medical testing technologies from getting funded. After the scam was exposed investors were afraid of it happening again and refused to fund medical testing startups. Not only did people get improper medical care from her lies, but people are continuing to suffer as a result of what she did.

u/truthputer 14h ago

The Boring Company did the same thing, although it was on purpose and to prevent development of public transit which musk saw as a threat to selling more cars.

u/Zuwxiv 13h ago edited 13h ago

I've been on The Loop in Las Vegas. If I told you it was a sad, pathetic failure by any metric, you would still be imagining something much better than it is.

To add some details and context, it was sold as an extremely fast mass transit option with autonomous vehicles carrying people to destinations across Las Vegas through tunnels. It's failed at literally all of those things.

  • Mass transit: Multiple times, there was literally nobody - no vehicle, no driver, no people waiting around. Almost nobody is using these, even at places like the Las Vegas Convention Center (which is enormous).
  • Autonomous: I said "driver." There's a regular driver in every vehicle. It's just a Tesla brand taxi.
  • Extremely fast: I think the speed limit was around 35mph. You still had to wait for one to show up.
  • Tunnels: Literally every time I took one, it involved using surface streets for at least part of the way. Some of the "stations" are on the road outside of hotels, like where people would have waited for a taxi or Uber/Lyft.
  • Destinations: The build out is like a decade behind schedule, which is the only part of this that makes sense given how it's completely failed to achieve any of the stated goals.

It's an extremely fast nearly school-zone speed mass transit car for 3 people option with autonomous vehicles a driver carrying people almost nobody to destinations across Las Vegas a few select places through tunnels surface streets.

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u/VRRifter 15h ago

It's even worse than that. There were a lot of rich people that believed her lies and lost some money.

u/Lespaul42 15h ago

Hey we found the only reason she is serving jail time!

u/nutmegtell 15h ago

She was a young pretty woman that fooled them all.

She had to pay.

u/say592 13h ago

Nah, that's part of why she got off fairly light. They could laugh to their friends and say "Yeah, but did you see her!" Someone like Sam Bankman-Fried pulls one over on them and they don't even have an excuse.

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u/nutmegtell 15h ago

That’s what this is all about. The Sacklers actually killed hundreds of thousands and didn’t get this treatment.

u/hoppertn 15h ago edited 13h ago

This is the only reason she actually got prison time instead of a fine. The golden rule has always been don’t steal from the rich.

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u/casualfrog68 15h ago

Many scientists tried to warn them. Greed is a sickness. They basically refused to listen.

Just like the AI bubble now. There is no possible way for many of these companies to make back the investments before the expensive chips start needing replacement.

u/nixielover 13h ago

Yes I remember a professor ranting during his lecture on how what theranos claimed being impossible around their peak, roughly 2012 or 2013 I believe. At the time it didn't register with us students how big this company was getting but when the collapse happened it all clicked

u/Sweetwill62 11h ago

I found out who her dad was, guy who ran Enron, and said "Yup that is a scam." Didn't need any other research because it was obvious. If I could tell that, what does that say for the people that did invest? Are they that stupid? Or were they in on it? I think they were in on it.

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u/_Atrophy_Annie_ 14h ago

Might be the one good thing to come out of Kissinger living so long... At least he got to live through the shame of getting scammed and made a fool of by Elizabeth Holmes!

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u/Potential_Being_7226 14h ago

I’m listening to the podcast the Dropout right now, so the timing of this is wild to me, and there are so many details that I think the show the Dropout didn’t get into. More personal perspective from the whistleblowers and the people who got “results” back from their tests. It’s harrowing. One woman who had 3-4 miscarriages has a falsely low HCG reading from theranos and thought she was having another miscarriage. Thankfully, she did another reading shortly thereafter (due to her history she was having regular HCG tests and decided to go to her next blood draw just in case) and she later gave birth to a healthy baby girl. You can’t help but feel for all the people that were so deeply affected by her self-serving lies.

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u/PriscillaPalava 15h ago

And then she got pregnant specifically to try and stay out of jail. She is a true psychopath. 

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u/mowotlarx 15h ago

She was so incredibly close to getting away with it. If she tried to launch this closer to COVID she'd have pivoted to COVID testing and ended up with billions.

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u/Niceromancer 14h ago

She's not so e master manipulator.

People fell for her shit because they thought they could make money off it.

VC bros aren't exactly smart, all they think about is "if this blows up I'll make lots of money" not weather or not it's possible.

It's basically like playing poker and going all in on every hand.  And just buying more chips every time till you win.  It doesn't take intelligence, or even luck for this to work.  It takes having enough money to do it repeatedly.

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u/jasoncross00 13h ago

The sick part is, that's not why she's going to prison. Screwing over users doesn't get you jailtime in corporate America.

She screwed over INVESTORS. That's what she got busted for. Fraud against Theranos' investors, wire fraud, and destroying evidence.

Holmes fucked over the money and they don't take kindly to that. If she made her investors rich but screwed over regular people, they'd still be in business and she'd be a champion of the TechBro set.

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u/byebyebrain 15h ago

her sentence is so light in comparison to how much money she made. I mean...this is why white collar crime pays. If you steal some stuff from the local pharmacy 3x you could go to prison for the same amount of time as this POS.

If they don't make the prison sentences longer, people will just keep trying to do what she did

u/loves_grapefruit 14h ago

In China sometimes people get executed for this type of shit

u/SUDDENLY_VIRGIN 13h ago

Too bad we only execute the poor here

u/MechaGodzillaSS 12h ago

You have to be directly murderous here. She was only indirectly murderous.

u/RJ815 7h ago

Nah, poor people suffer all the time with death, disease, and disability. The ONLY white collar crime punished is fucking with other rich people's money. It's why Bernie Madoff went to jail.

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u/Ssided 14h ago

It really speaks to the ignorance of people in charge of large sums of money if you pull back from her as a character in the whole thing.

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u/skratch 15h ago

Nathan Fielder is a friggin genius who has blown my mind a few times now. Absolutely no doubt that this is gonna be really really good.

u/RaisinToastie 13h ago

“The Rehearsal” is a masterpiece

u/RichieRicch 11h ago

About to finish season 2, started this show earlier today. Absolutely insane.

u/UncreativeTeam 11h ago

I'm so jealous you haven't seen the ending of S2

u/LosSoloLobos 9h ago

I’ve only seen the guy who lied about his credentials to get on a trivia team or something like that. Should I give it another go?

u/panic_the_digital 8h ago

That’s kind of an appetizer as to the concept, but the rest of the season has a different focus that gets pretty wild. Then season 2 takes it to a whole new level

u/Think_please 5h ago

Season 2 is completely different than season 1. 

That said, if you don’t appreciate his humor don’t torture yourself with it. I enjoyed both seasons a lot but to me season 2 was an absolute masterpiece.

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u/Dr-McLuvin 14h ago

Ya I’m genuinely excited everything he has done has been great. He’s like our generation’s comedic genius in a world of absolute slop entertainment.

u/MR_PENNY_PIINCHER 11h ago

This is a collaboration with Lance Oppenheim also, director of the documentaries Some Kind Of Heaven and Ren Faire, along with the upcoming narrative film Primetime.

Incredible pedigree behind this project

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u/HumanShadow 15h ago

She belongs in the "Black Hole Sun" music video

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u/Jim-be 13h ago

WTF??!! That really is Elizabeth Holmes playing herself in that super creepy trailer??!! I went to look up who is playing her because she going get an academy but it’s just her being her creepy self. How the hell do people listen to her and look at her and not see a total sociopath? That uncanny valley weirdo can barely act human.

u/DebentureThyme 12h ago

It's funny because I was going to say "well she's not playing herself, this was documentary footage shot before she went to prison."

But then I realize, yes, she absolutely is playing "herself", this is all an act for her.  Everything she does is an act.

u/C0rinthian 12h ago

Which is why this is almost tailor-made for Fielder/Oppenheim.

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u/morningreis 15h ago

She is a manipulator for certain. However, i really loathe how little coverage there is of her investors barely pushing back against her claims and stuck their heads in the sand, even when people were sounding the alarm. I hope this documentary sheds some light on that part of it too.

There are lots of good bullshitters in the world. The only reason this fraud went as far as it did was because she found a gullible audience too.

u/No_Safety_6803 14h ago

How little coverage of her investors not pushing back? John Carreyrou’s reporting and book spent a lot of time on her enablers.

u/KiKiKimbro 14h ago

Reminds me of the investors who lost multi-billions when Adam Neumann and his whackadoo wife ran WeWork into the ground. And at least one of them invested in him again.

u/Dahcchad 14h ago

Idk it seems pretty on brand for investment and finance guys. It's not too dissimilar from the huge banks that willingly built a house of cards out of subprime mortgages and risky loans. They know when they're taking risks, they just try to grab as much money as possible.

u/strolls 10h ago

The Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine has a skit on this, which I think he developed after Adam Neumann bought WeWork back, along the lines of "on Wall Street losing a billion dollars is actually good, because it means that somebody trusted you with a billion dollars to invest for them, so you must be good at investing, and also now you have experience at that and you've learned from your mistakes".

I keep text clippings of Matt Levine quotes on my desktop because he gives insights into global finance the way mainstream comedians give insight into other aspects of life.

u/Textiles_on_Main_St 14h ago

Henry Kissinger was a big investor. He was super old and never known for his good decisions.

u/nonhiphipster 14h ago

I have the sense this documentary isn’t gonna give you the answers you seek. It seems to be focused on her, and her alone.

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u/sir_mrej 14h ago

The miniseries does a really good job with that

u/ilmostro696 13h ago

I would also add her advisors at Stanford University as well. How could they possibly vouch for her without really understanding the phony technology she was pushing.

u/Amardneron 11h ago

To be fair the profesor in the actual related field called her out the whole time.

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u/PlanningForLaziness 12h ago

That trailer needed at least 300% more blinking. Sweet psychopath Christ.

u/have_heart 8h ago

If it’s the one I saw it was so uncomfortable. It had a strangely sexual nature about it the way they kept staring at each other

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u/8Deer-JaguarClaw 15h ago

That trailer clip looks like something out of a fictional drama film, not a documentary. Very strange all around.

u/Rokketeer 15h ago

I genuinely thought this was all acting and she was someone portraying a character. But no it’s all real.

u/BufferUnderpants 13h ago

She came across as so eerily fake that at first I thought it was an actress parodying her. Nope.

u/draynen 13h ago

I legitimately thought I was watching the trailer for some new psychological horror film. I had to Google it after the fact when I saw at the end of the trailer that it was a documentary, and even then I initially assumed it was a "documentary" just Blair Witch was a "documentary".

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u/CigaroEmbargo 15h ago

First time seeing Nathan Fielder’s work?

u/8Deer-JaguarClaw 15h ago

I guess so. I just looked at his list of credits on IMDB and didn't recognize any of them.

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u/Propolandante 15h ago

That's Lance Oppenheim's style. He blurs the line between documentary and performance, and the presentation is a big part of that.

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u/truckstick_burns 13h ago

In that original doc about her company and her business partner it's made clear she's very weird, outside of the scamming and hurting people/investors.

She would speak with a fake voice to try appear more dominant, change her cadence and even dress in a turtleneck to try mimic Steve Jobs.

She's very performative.

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u/DiscoLemonade1995 13h ago

Her husband and the father of her children went to highschool with me (three years above me). Finding out that they were dating was maybe the most random and unexpected story I've ever heard. Hope he's in the documentary!

u/Gloomy-Incident4783 12h ago

I’ve heard he is featured very prominently and may well be the villain of the movie.

u/interrobang2020 10h ago

I hope they explore that relationship, because I'm confused as to why he'd have a baby with a convicted felon who was about to serve her sentence. Something is clearly off about him.

u/sarbear8199 10h ago

I read the review for this on indie wire earlier today and apparently the hubby ends up unexpectedly taking up a HUGE role in the documentary.

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u/RipErRiley 14h ago

The fact she is casually rocking her baby with her foot while she was so invested in that serious, crazy eyes (it was almost sexual in intensity) dialogue with Nathan was creepy as fuck.

u/turkoosi_aurinko 14h ago

Wouldst thou like to engage... human being-ly?

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u/C0rinthian 12h ago

The baby reveal being delayed so long until that cut to the wide shot was fucking cinema.

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u/Count_Rugens_Finger 13h ago

How could someone so creepy and obviously sociopathic ever be a "master manipulator"? Who doesn't run for the hills after 1 minute of face-to-face?

u/imperfcet 9h ago

Venture capitalism is packed to the gills with fake-ass people, they just assume that's what normal humans look like

u/HiphopopoptimusPrime 9h ago

She’s a blonde woman. Thats all it took for old rich white guys to trust her.
If she had big tits as well she’d never have been caught.
Seriously, nobody did any due diligence. She managed to coast by on vibes.

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u/jodirm 13h ago

I mean, as soon as she says “I’m always being real” we know it’s all bullshit. That anyone would believe her on anything anymore is madness. But in America nowadays she’ll probably become Trump’s Technology Czar and win a made-up award from Meta.

u/Capt-Crap1corn 13h ago

My question is if she ever used her real voice throughout the documentary

u/Cheek-Tasty 14h ago

I recall discussing this in a clinical laboratory/hospital setting in the early 2010s. Our (older, less competent) boss was hyped for their technology. Anyone actually still doing clinical science, and understood it. was incredibly skeptical and didn’t buy in.

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u/Inevitable_Ad_4487 13h ago

You had me at Nathan Fielder!

u/Rowan1980 12h ago edited 11h ago

So it takes a lot to unsettle me, but that trailer genuinely left me rattled, and I am still trying to pinpoint why that’s the case—and it’s specifically something to do with Holmes. It’s probably something as simple as “She is so not okay on several levels.”

I should add that the initial shots in particular triggered that feeling, and it didn’t click that she was Holmes until I watched the trailer in full. (I had just woken up and was not caffeinated.)

u/LeopoldineBel 10h ago

It’s that unrelenting fixed stare of hers. It’s unnatural and predatory.
She never looks away and she barely blinks.

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u/RJ815 7h ago

She comes across as an unsubtle sociopath. Such people are dangerous, or unstable, and I think that's why it feels like a horror movie. The camera angles are definitely part of it, the wide shot is more goofy / dark comedy minus the unsettling detail of the baby. If an actress was in a horror movie they'd have to fake coming across as "possessed" as Holmes.

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u/Kholzie 12h ago

She is a train wreck and my schadenfreude perks up every time I see her name.

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u/SNRatio 15h ago

I'd be stunned if the documentary revealed the actual technical details of the Edison and Minilab devices and what Theranos knew internally about their actual performance. I'm not stunned that she is still very effective at manipulating influential people into supporting her.

u/captain_poptart 15h ago

She’s so creepy. I think we need to find a way to figure out who these people are and remove them from society

u/Current-Bowl-143 14h ago

That’s called prison, and the longer she’s in there the better

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u/4d3fect 14h ago

Secret? 

u/BulletStorm 14h ago

I think this documentary has been kept under wraps until being debuted at this film fest? I.e. Nathan Fielder didn’t announce he was doing this, A24 didn’t do any press, etc.

And now it’s in theaters next month. At least for me, big surprise!

u/D34THST4R 14h ago

It was reported 9 months ago that he was spotted visiting her in prison multiple times. At the time I thought it might be part of The Rehearsal season 3 but I did NOT expect a feature length documentary to be aired in theaters.

u/BulletStorm 14h ago

Thank you for politely fact-checking me 👍

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u/TheShipEliza 14h ago

We love the story but refuse to learn the lesson

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u/Garchompisbestboi 12h ago

I don't know if she had plastic surgery or something but she definitely looks like she's been hobbit-maxxing over the past decade. She looked just like Sam's wife at the end of ROTK

u/C0rinthian 12h ago

Imagine how detached from reality you need to be to say “yes, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim are the people to tell my story”

The trailer is fucking wild. I cannot wait for whatever this is.

u/Beneficial_Twist_580 11h ago

i thought it was a bit at first too. shes got that thing where shes so stiff it loops back around to feeling scripted.

nathan finding her instead of the other way around wouldve been wild enough. her reaching out is just. what do you even do with that.

u/Liesthroughisteeth 11h ago

She then went a different route last year, asking President Trump to commute her sentence. That clemency petition is still listed as pending, meaning it’s officially been opened and remains under review.

She's working at raising the money for his quite high asking price to do her this solid.

u/Novagurl 13h ago

I forgot all about her and when I saw a clip of the documentary, I honestly thought she was an AI robot, it was a horror movie and the actor was figuring out that she obviously wasn’t human. 😬

u/Bored_Amalgamation 11h ago

Yo. What the fuck was that trailer? That was a fucking aspect of the devil.

u/Necessary-Road-2397 6h ago

Imagine that, a narcissist with borderline personality disorder is trying to manipulate people into believing she's the victim.

u/TangoForThree 5h ago

This is going to be one of the best horror films of the year.

u/JuliaX1984 15h ago

Isn't that a species in Star Trek?

u/gn0meCh0msky 15h ago

No, that's the Tellarites. Telluride is in CO.

u/vahnsin 14h ago

You might be thinking of the rare oxide mineral. Telluride is a rugged, 8-seat SUV.

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u/bad_take_ 14h ago

How do people have a conversation like that while there are cameras right up in their face? I find it hard to believe that this was just a typical conversation and that no one was playing to the camera.

u/Current-Bowl-143 14h ago

She’s a narcissist and a psychopath. She probably thinks this shows her in a good light

u/Wrong_Swordfish 13h ago

An important thing I always remember is they have no idea when they dont have the upper hand. They ALWAYS think they are smarter than the other person. Even so much so that they doubt court decisions and still believe innocence even when they are the ones that did the crime.

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u/ToasterDispenser 13h ago

These are long lenses. They aren't nearly as close as you think.

u/Ohitsworkingnow 13h ago

The cameras are there for weeks or months, she’s also been in the public eye for years and and years. The synopsis for the movie said this turned into a “3 year journey” or something like that 

Nathan fielder is also as legit as it gets so 

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