Billy Evans 到底怎么回事？《You Can See Everything》剧透版指南

It’s been a week since I’ve seen You Can See Everything, the new documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, and I still want to talk about it. From what I’m hearing, most of you want to talk about it too, and I’m not surprised. As we discussed on the episode last week, Elizabeth Holmes has proven to be one of the most enduringly fascinating characters our culture has produced. On top of that, the documentary introduces us to a new fascinating and emblematic character: Holmes’s domineering, sniffling, gun-toting romantic partner, Billy Evans.

The movie raises a lot of questions about Holmes. Is she a sociopath, neurodivergent, self-aware, or controlled by the men in her life? But it raises as many questions about Evans: Who is this guy? Where does he come from, and why does he care so much about his scrambled eggs? What is he like when the cameras are off, and what is he getting out of this relationship? For that matter, what is she getting out of it?

We’re going to take on these 2 characters one at a time by talking with people who have reported on them. First, I talked to Times finance reporter Rob Copeland, who spoke extensively with Billy while reporting on his blood-testing startup last year, and whose reaction to You Can See Everything surprised me. We were joined by Erin Griffith, who reported on the Theranos trial, to discuss the fascinating character of Billy, the mystery of their relationship, and the response to the film in Silicon Valley. Then John Carreyrou came back to answer your questions about Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos, and the truth of what she knows.

One final note: While we were gentle last week, this episode is filled with spoilers. If you haven’t seen You Can See Everything, I suggest you hit pause now. But if you have, sit back and relax. I’m joined by finance reporter Rob Copeland, who interviewed Billy Evans about his new startup last year, and tech writer Erin Griffith, who reported on Elizabeth Holmes’s trial for The Times. Welcome to Hard Fork, guys.

Hey.

Thank you.

1. Billy Evans Builds Haemanthus

One of the biggest surprises of this movie is that the person who dominates it over 3 hours is not Elizabeth Holmes, the subject, nor Nathan Fielder, the director-documentarian. It’s this guy Billy Evans, Elizabeth Holmes’s romantic partner and also a business partner. Billy is basically the protagonist, certainly of the second half of the movie. I don’t think this is the right phrase, but he’s kind of the breakout star, to the extent that a sniffling, reactionary, quasi-manic force in a 3-hour documentary can be referred to as the breakout star.

He’s the person I had the most questions about when I emerged. So, Rob, you spoke with Billy for an article you wrote last May called “Elizabeth Holmes’s Partner Has a New Blood-Testing Startup.” I want to get into that story and the connection to Theranos, but maybe we can start by you telling us how that story came together.

Sure. This might be crazy if you’ve seen the movie now, but about a year ago, someone told me they’d heard that Billy Evans had a blood-testing startup, and I thought that was the wildest thing I’d ever heard. I thought I was being scammed. I thought, “Be more creative than Elizabeth Holmes doing it all over again.”

So you hear that he’s running a blood-testing startup and you start making calls.

I start making calls, and someone had sort of tipped me off that he had asked them for money. This person obviously took the meeting for the same reason we would: “I can’t believe this is happening.” I will say that last year, when I got wind that there was such a thing as Theranos 2.0, although that wasn’t what they were calling it by that time, I thought I’d call Billy Evans and he would tell me to jump off a bridge. In fact, he was extremely charming.

When I called him and said, “I want to talk about your startup,” he said, “Which startup?” as a joke. I mean, maybe the one that involves blood testing, but yeah.

Yeah.

Tell me a little more about this business. We know it’s called Haemanthus, which is the name of a flower also known as the blood lily, and it’s really intended for pets.

Correct. The idea was you could take a sample from your pet instead of having to go to a vet and spend, say, $500 on a blood test. You could do it for a dollar a test.

And presumably the reason they’re starting with pets is that there’s a lower regulatory threshold for them.

Well, Max, I’m glad you asked, because I just so happen to have here a piece of paper that Billy sent me, which was evidence in his mind that this was a lower-regulated business. It’s dated October 2024, and it’s correspondence with the USDA. He said that this is evidence that they’re allowed to do this. I called the USDA. They said, “That’s not what that means.”

What do you think was different between the Billy you talked to and the Billy that we see in the movie, if anything?

I would say the big similarity is that Billy has a tendency to say, “You can ask me anything you want,” that he is an open book, and then proceeds not to tell you everything you do want to know.

The big difference between what I was talking about and what was on screen was that on screen he’s so open about how Elizabeth is involved in this. I would have had no idea last year, while I was speaking to him, that they had already filmed months or years of footage of the two of them starting this thing together.

Yeah.

My impression was that she had nothing to do with this company, that they didn’t bring her up in meetings. It was like she who must not be named. She’s certainly not mentioned in the deck, and Billy will give you long speeches about how qualified he is to start this, what a brilliant scientist he is, and how he helped start this company that helps do radar for self-driving cars.

It was like the biggest inside joke, right? A blood-testing startup from Elizabeth Holmes’s partner. The photographs they’re providing look suspiciously identical to the Theranos device, but, oh goodness gracious, don’t make the connection. I thought I was breaking the biggest story in the history of technology, business, and media. It turned out that Billy had been filming a documentary, memorializing it for 2 years.

Just to put this in the context of the film: In 2023, we see them in San Diego. They’re both on the phone with what we understand to be potential investors in this new thing they’re starting up. Elizabeth goes to jail. Billy continues working on it. Around 2025, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the directors of the documentary, start visiting him in Austin again. It’s around this same time that you’re discovering that this startup is coming out, and you eventually publish the piece. What was his reaction to your piece?

He was not thrilled with the piece, I think it’s fair to say.

I mean, he probably was fighting it all along the way, right? I’m assuming that if they wanted this documentary to be the big reveal of Theranos 2.0, your story would’ve messed that up.

Yeah, he kept trying to push the story down the line. He kept saying, “Oh, you can come visit the lab. You can do a great story of the lab.” And then I would say, “Okay, what’s in the lab?” He’d say, “Well, the lab isn’t working yet.”

At that point, I’m sitting with my editors and saying, “What are we going to see in Austin?” To be clear, this startup had raised somewhere around $3 million, which, much respect to Mr. Evans, is just not enough to start a blood-testing company. Think of all the—

Well, you’ve got to start somewhere. I mean, I think Theranos’s first checks were probably very small, too, and then they eventually built up to, you know, $100 million from Murdoch.

I would love to start with $3 million, personally. Did you talk to anybody who did invest in this business?

I didn’t speak to anyone who did, although we did find records of at least 1 person who had invested in it. He runs a tapas restaurant in downtown Austin, and Billy described him to me as a friend.

Mm.

So it seems like it was at that level.

But to your point, Rob, what we’re hearing is a company that’s raised $3 million, which is 2 orders of magnitude lower than it would take to think of yourself as a tech player. As far as we know, there are not many notable investors except for this gentleman who owns a tapas bar in Austin. I’m trying to think of the right way to ask this question: Is this a real company?

If I were Elizabeth, I would say, “Look, what is a real company? What do you mean by ‘real’?” It’s a real company in the sense that it did successfully raise money.

It’s not a real company in the sense that it has a product that does anything. What really struck me, too, was the gall. Billy was going after huge investors. He was going after Jim Breyer, one of the first backers of Facebook, and Michael Dell, probably the most famous investor not named Elon Musk in Texas. He really thought he was going to be able to raise money from the top tier for this.

What I thought was so notable about your story, too, is that in Silicon Valley, there’s this unspoken rule: If you pass on a company, you might tell your friends, “Oh, we didn’t invest in that,” but it sends a really negative signal to the company, and you don’t want to be seen as not founder-friendly. No investor would ever publicly tell The New York Times or anyone in the media, “I declined to invest in this company.” In fact, that’s what stopped investors the first time around with Theranos 1.0 from speaking out and saying, “I looked at this company, but it didn’t pass the smell test for me.” They’re all worried about coming off as not founder-friendly.

The fact that you have someone like Jim Breyer on the record saying, “We looked at this company and we thought it was no good, so we passed,” is extremely unusual.

Well, I think it also speaks to the fact that Billy is not someone anyone thought they had to protect.

Yes.

There’s not a future relationship with Billy Evans that anybody necessarily wanted.

Well, okay, one other question I had: Isn’t part of Elizabeth’s punishment as a convicted felon that she can’t be involved in securities?

She can’t be an officer, for sure.

Yeah.

Can she informally advise her partner on his company? How could you enforce that, right?

Well, certainly, if it was illegal, you wouldn’t want to have a lot of footage of the two of you making investment calls on behalf of the company.

If those calls were made in 2023, I do question their veracity, because this company was not raising money in 2023.

Wait, what do you mean?

If those calls were filmed in 2023—

Yeah.

There was no Theranos 2.0. Maybe they were casual phone calls, but those were not serious “we’re about to raise money” calls. The real Haemanthus starts around 2024, about a year later. They don’t have offices. As of last year, they were still working out of a house in Austin. It’s still a very, very early startup.

Mm-hmm. And at this point, Elizabeth Holmes is in prison, so this is entirely—I mean, with the exception of whatever advice she’s giving him during their visiting days—this is entirely Billy.

Correct, yeah.

And they have a patent, and she’s not on it.

Right. Let me take this in a slightly different direction. Having now seen the movie, and this question is for both of you: What did you make of their relationship?

We talked about this a little bit last week, but it was so reminiscent of her relationship with Sunny Balwani, especially when it comes down to the fact that they’re starting the same company all over again. It’s clear that the movie wants you to make that connection.

When I was preparing for this podcast, I went back and looked at the eight-page, single-spaced letter Billy wrote to the court ahead of Holmes’s sentencing to essentially argue for her to get a lower sentence. There were over 100 letters that she collected from a bunch of people, and it was really fascinating because it was kind of the first look into her personal life. There were a lot of photos in his letter.

One thing that really stuck out to me was that even then, he was participating in this narrative that the movie continues: She’s this sort of weird person who doesn’t really relate to others in the same way, and that’s why she was a bit of a miscommunicator with investors. He had this line in the letter about how so many things written about her were untrue, including the fact that she’s a good salesperson. He writes, “Liz has no ability to sell something. She simply believes in things with such depth that it is alluring. She’s more of a zealot than a showman.”

That fits into the movie a little bit, because the movie is showing us how she believes her own reality. So you’re like, “Okay, I sort of see the narrative that you’re making,” and it actually is kind of proven out in the movie.

Yeah.

I think I had a slightly different take. One, I didn’t necessarily buy their relationship 100%, but as someone who interviews people for a living, he did something very recognizable: He volunteered answers to questions that were not asked. Nathan asks him if he was dating other people when he met Elizabeth, and all of a sudden he’s volunteering, “I was dating three people, actually.”

He has a PR strategy to answer the question he wishes he’d been asked. It’s sort of our job as journalists to get around that or to just repeat the question, but that seems very B-list corporate executive who’s just done one day of PR training to me.

Probably at 2X speed, right?

Yeah.

For sure. Whereas Elizabeth was at least a difficult person to interview, really, if you were trying to get anything through to her, because she’s just looking at you and not blinking.

Do you guys think—I’m just going to come out and ask it—do you guys think they’re in love?

Yeah. Maybe I’m just a sucker who got taken along for a ride by Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes, but I felt like their relationship was genuine. It was maybe the most genuine thing in the whole movie.

I thought, honestly, they had definitely made eggs together before. He knew how long that was going to take, and I related to that.

Having made eggs with somebody in the past, you were able to recognize that exact dynamic.

And, by the way, for the record, he’s wrong. You shouldn’t overbeat scrambled eggs. It makes them tough. She was doing a better job.

This is the kind of hard-hitting stuff—

Justice.

—you can only get on Hard Fork: how to make eggs.

2. Could Theranos Rise Again

One reason I want to ask about the love stuff is that, Rob, something that has come together in our conversations for me is the sense that part of what Billy gets out of this relationship is attention, notoriety, and access to people he might not otherwise have. In many ways, it sounds like Haemanthus is a sort of circus show. It doesn’t have a ton of money. The only thing it offers is kind of an inside joke, as you were saying.

So I wanted to ask you, Erin, as somebody who reports on the world of investing in Silicon Valley: Is there any chance they could build this into something bigger than a joke?

There has been this trend in the last few years of big Silicon Valley venture capital firms doing what can be characterized as a troll investment: writing a big check to someone who has either been canceled or embroiled in controversy. There have been a few of these deals lately. A lot of them are coming from Andreessen Horowitz. They gave money to Andy Rubin, who was pushed out of Google after being accused of sexual impropriety with some colleagues. They gave over $300 million to Adam Neumann for his WeWork, WeLive, Flow company.

There’s a history of firms investing in a controversial founder as a way to make a stand, to say, “We don’t care about the media or the zeitgeist or cancel culture or anything like that. We are going to back founders no matter what.” I could see somebody taking that side of the bet.

That said, I did do a little search, and I haven’t seen too many examples of VC firms doing this for people who are actually convicted of fraud.

Yeah.

She’s a felon. The only example I can find is Trevor Milton, who was the CEO of Nikola, the self-driving truck company that famously posted that video of its truck driving itself, but in fact it was rolling down a hill. That guy was pardoned by Trump, and he now has a new company called Cyberjet Aircraft. They were going out trying to raise some money. He’s the CEO of that company, and I don’t know if they’ve actually raised a lot of money.

Billy McFarland from Fyre Fest has not been successful in trying to raise money. I do think there’s a chance they draw a line at someone who has actually been convicted of fraud. TBD on Sam Bankman-Fried whenever he gets out, or if he’s working on FTX 2.0 with Caroline Ellison from prison.

Yeah. Speaking of the great love stories of our time.

Can I add something? Sorry, just one thing I sort of disagree with you on, Erin, is—

Please.

I think we underestimate a little bit how much they love to prove journalists wrong—at least on Wall Street, for sure—

Yes.

—and pundits wrong. The fact that this film has reignited a whole bunch of people like us talking about, “Oh my gosh, can you believe what she did? Can you believe she actually…” No, guys, I swear she was found guilty by a jury of her peers. That just pushes that button, right, to flip back at you. I’ve definitely been hearing from people who want me to know that she’s not all that bad. I could see a universe in which it works.

I think the thing it would hinge on is if she gets a pardon, because then that’s just an easy way to tell that story to investors and for them to tell it to their LPs.

One theme of the movie, and one thing consistent with what you’re talking about, is that there’s a political edge to this. Part of the journey we see Billy take over the course of the film is from this overprotective but, let’s be honest, controlling sort of supportive partner to this jaw-grinding, gun-toting reactionary who’s defending Charlie Kirk over the dinner table.

Jessica Reed Kraus, who runs a blog called House Inhabit, which I’m not quite sure how to put it other than to say it’s a MAGA gossip blog, has declared Elizabeth Holmes the original MAGA. There are these vague efforts to grab onto Holmes, aided by Billy, as a kind of Trumpian figure, a figure for the tech right. Maybe if anybody’s going to do it, it would be Andreessen Horowitz, but I agree with you that there needs to be some kind of pardon or mechanism they can use to tell the story.

A MAGA gossip blog is what Erin calls me on Slack when she’s angry. That’s what it is.

Speaking of the Charlie Kirk scene, one of the big real-world revelations in the movie—maybe “big” is overstating it, but it certainly feels big in the movie—is that Elizabeth Holmes’s Twitter account, which has been active during the time she’s been in prison and has gotten strangely combative and conservative, is being run by Billy. Billy is sort of claiming either that she’s sending him the specific words or that he’s just tweeting on her behalf. I imagine, Rob, you had no idea this was happening while you were interviewing him.

I had no idea, and it would’ve been so off the wall, truly.

There’s one tweet in particular that doesn’t quite play a role in the movie, but bears on something that happens in it. I’m going to read this and then some other tweets, and I want you guys to tell me whether you think they’re tweets from Elizabeth Holmes or from Billy Evans. The first tweet: “Charlie Kirk talked profoundly about forgiveness, its power. I keep thinking about that today and what it means to rise in the face of the unforgivable.” Is that Elizabeth Holmes or Billy Evans?

That sounds like her. It’s pretty obvious, especially having watched the movie, which tweets are coming from Holmes and which ones are coming from Billy.

Okay, here’s one.

There’s one that’s very online-brain, and the other is kind of fortune-cookie inspirational stuff.

She posts a photo of Daenerys from Game of Thrones. Daenerys is the dragon princess who emerges from flames, having birthed dragons to retake her throne, and she says, “They can bruise and bloody me, but still I rise.” Is that Elizabeth or Billy?

Given that she didn’t even know about Abbott and Costello, I feel like she probably hasn’t seen Game of Thrones. Maybe, but it feels like Billy.

That’s a Billy one. Okay, one about Zohran Mamdani. What are the odds that Zohran Mam—

I’m just going to say Billy.

Okay, I’m not going to read it. It’s Billy.

How does she even know? Wait, is she—oh, this is the councilman she really liked?

Okay, here’s one. It’s a question: “Ever feel like a book was written for you?” It’s a, I’m pretty sure, AI-generated image of a hardcover book titled How to Fit into Society When You’re an Alien from an Alternate Universe.

This speaks to the narrative I was talking about, that Billy’s trying to put out there about her—how she’s just so strange and unknowable and weird. In a way, it kind of feels like him. And we know at least that she did not AI-generate—

Yeah.

—a book from prison.

Okay, I’m going to do one more. Thank you for playing along with this game. It just says, “Never forget who you are.”

That sounds like her.

I was going to say Billy.

I do wonder—

It depends on if you see it with menace or with, like, inspiration. Right?

I do wonder a little bit—I don’t want to speculate too much about this—but there is a suggestion in the way they talk about her and Billy’s closeness with her, even in prison, that she has a phone somewhere in jail.

I’ve actually done some reporting on this with—don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this young man, Martin Shkreli—who is in prison. I did a bit of reporting around SBF, too. Everyone has a phone in prison. It’s the biggest unspoken secret. The guards love when you have phones because then they don’t have to worry. The safest thing you could do is just watch stupid TikTok all day.

Wow. That’s a really powerful thought for all of us to have when we scroll tonight: the guards are happy when we’re not doing anything interesting.

Guys, thank you for coming and talking about Billy Evans, Elizabeth Holmes, and You Can See Everything With Me.

3. CoreWeave's Debt Comes Due

I’ve asked my guests to bring a piece of news they’re tracking this week and tell us a little bit about why they think it’s important. Rob, what are you following this week, and why is it important?

I am all of a sudden obsessed with this company you haven’t heard of called CoreWeave. CoreWeave is a—

Oh, I know CoreWeave.

Pardon me, Erin, but get your own topic.

Tell me about—

Welcome to AI infra.

Yeah. Tell me about CoreWeave, Rob.

CoreWeave is an AI middleman, essentially. They buy the compute—the processors. They stick it into warehouses, and they lease the space to companies whose names you might have heard of, like Anthropic or these other huge AI startups. The problem is that, to grow so fast, they’ve taken on a huge amount of debt. They have something like $70 billion in liabilities across 51 different data centers, and their stock is suddenly in a free fall.

They’re starting to have to pay twice as much to service their debt. It’s a classic Wall Street financing story of a company that grew and grew and grew and grew and just assumed the market would go one direction: up. Spoiler alert: there’s always another side.

Do you think they’re a canary in the coal mine for all this crazy infrastructure spending that’s been happening over the last 4 years?

They’re definitely an early sign of that. What I will say is that everyone, myself included, is super into AI as a tech story—as in, what can Muse do? But—

Sure.

—from my seat, it’s a financing story as much as anything else.

These companies have said that they need to borrow as much as $10 trillion to get this to work. We’re nowhere near even beginning that climb, and we’re already starting to see the market shake a little.

So this is not the kind of thing, in your estimation, where CoreWeave could go down, but everything else keeps going up and to the right?

No. They’re very much a proxy for a certain part of the market at large. The financial aspect of this story, in my opinion, is going to play out faster than the technological side.

And I think this really ties into—I’m working on a story on this now—Anthropic’s IPO as well. Everyone’s looking to Anthropic to see: Is this demand for AI unlimited, or are there limits? Is it elastic? Are people limited in what they’re willing to pay? Because that then trickles down to the likes of CoreWeave, right?

When we say “trickles,” by the way, Anthropic is so huge, with this $1.5 trillion or so offering. CoreWeave is a $40 billion company. This isn’t trickling down to a nobody. These are real-size companies.

Right, it’s not Humantis.

Wow, shots fired over here at the Hard Fork studios.

It’s roughly 10,000 Humantises.

Exactly. And even this week, Ken Griffin, one of the most famous hedge fund investors, said that he thought we’re in an AI bubble. When you start hearing that, from my seat, you just start waiting to see what falls first.

Well, that’s a cheery piece of news, Rob. Thank you. Erin, what are you tracking this week?

4. Musk Moves to Merge Empires

I’m interested in Elon Musk’s empire consolidation continuing. Ever since SpaceX decided it was going to rush into the public markets, there’s been speculation that the whole point is to set the company up so it can more easily merge with Tesla. Earlier this week, on SpaceX’s earnings call, Elon Musk basically confirmed that. He said they’re setting up committees of independent directors to explore a potential merger between giant SpaceX and giant Tesla. And he had this really amazing quote: “Because I’m a conflicted party, I can’t actually be in the discussions.” For someone in that position, it’s very, very funny to me.

Someone should make a three-hour documentary about this guy.

Four hours, in fact, is the Musk documentary. Rob, I’m sure you have pretty strong views on this as well, so I’d love to hear your thoughts.

My strongest view, as always—and this is copyright—is that reporters make terrible securities analysts. So, you know, don’t listen to us. What I will say is we all laughed at xAI and SpaceX merging earlier this year. It was a hugely positive thing for the IPO. It’s worked out by every possible standard so far, so it’s easy to laugh at this stuff. I do have a—

The track record of Musk consolidating his empire is exactly that story, going all the way back to when Tesla bought SolarCity. Everyone was kind of mad about it. It made no sense. He was just using one of his good businesses to rescue a struggling business. But, like you said, it has really all worked out for him in the end, and I think people seeing that track record are very willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Really, what’s driving this, I think, is that Elon Musk does not have control of Tesla in the same way that he does of SpaceX. Shareholders are able to push back a lot more. They have a little more leverage than they do with SpaceX, so I think merging them would give him the opportunity to get that control back. If he wants to throw a ton of money and lose a ton of money in the short term investing in robots for Tesla, he has more runway to do that if he’s got more control.

5. Meta's Conservative Whisperer Leaves

I want to share the story I’m tracking, which is that Joel Kaplan, Meta’s global policy chief, is leaving the company after 15 years. Kaplan is, to me at least, a really fascinating figure. He was a Scalia clerk. He participated in the infamous Brooks Brothers riot during the 2000 election. Most famously to people who aren’t committed Facebookologists, he was—and is—a close friend of Brett Kavanaugh’s, and he sat behind the Supreme Court justice during his confirmation hearings. This was, of course, when Christine Blasey Ford accused him of rape.

His role at Facebook has been a sort of conservative whisperer. Facebook, for the first 15 years of its existence, probably got more criticism from the right than it did from the left. There were all these, in my opinion, manufactured controversies about censorship, shadow banning, and trending topics. Kaplan’s legacy, I think, was helping them navigate those, mostly by shifting the company externally and internally a little bit to the right.

It would be sort of satisfying, I think, if you’re politically on the left, to imagine that Kaplan is leaving because the Republicans are going to get blown out in the midterms. But it seems much more likely that he’s just leaving because it’s been 15 years, the job is probably exhausting, he’s made a bundle of money, and why stick around?

Where do you think he’s going to land? Probably somewhere in the Trump administration?

It’s a good question. I suspect he’s a Rubio 2028 guy. I’m going to put that marker down right now. But for the next few months, the open guest house on Kauai at Mark’s estate is probably where he’s going to go.

Do you have a group chat with the other Facebookologists, as you called yourself?

No, I like to keep notes to myself. I’ve got a nice little corkboard in my garage and some red yarn so I can connect things. I don’t need to talk to people about this stuff.

Where do they go when they leave Facebook, then? Do you have a little separate island for them?

Yeah. I’ve got a couple of different filing cabinets. Don’t worry about what I’m doing in my private time.

By the way, what struck me was that he’s being replaced by Dina Powell McCormick, who has been there—I think she gets a new job every month there. She’s a former Goldman Sachs banker, a big Wall Street figure, one of the most charming salespeople on the street. I saw her last at a conference in May, where she was trying to convince me to try the glasses they came out with.

They’re her glasses.

Even she, a truly gifted salesperson, could not convince one person at that party to put those glasses on.

As Rob is talking about how charming he finds these people, I just want to remind you that this conversation started with a discussion of how charming he found Billy Evans, as you’re trying to adjust in your head Rob’s ability to suss out charisma.

John, welcome back to Hard Fork.

Thanks for having me again. This is becoming a regular thing.

6. John Carreyrou Reopens Theranos

Yeah, I’m enjoying it. We saw this movie last week. We both enjoyed it. We had a great conversation about it on Friday, and since then the movie has actually come out, and there’s been a frenzy over Elizabeth Holmes and some of the stuff that comes out in the movie.

I’m wondering what your experience of that has been like. You had been saying you were done with the Elizabeth Holmes story, and here you are right back in it.

It’s been surreal. This movie has gone completely viral, and it feels like the story has only become bigger in terms of its public impact. Even at the height of my newspaper reporting for The Wall Street Journal in 2015 and 2016, the height of the publicity around the book in 2018, or the coverage of the trial, I never felt like quite as many people were being read into the story and paying attention as they are now.

I was talking with some of our production staff, and they were saying they’ve been going to bookstores to pick up a copy. It’s sold out here in New York, and it’s flying off the shelves in airport bookstores. Have you heard any of this?

Before walking into the studio, I got an email from my editor at Knopf telling me they had just printed another batch of 10,000 copies. It’s been great. I like the fact that people are going to what I like to think is the definitive account of what happened. They don’t want to stop at just seeing the film. A lot of people understand that this is art, and they also want to get at the underlying facts and understand what happened.

Last week we talked about the movie. We did our best to avoid spoilers, because a lot of amazing, insane, unrepeatable stuff happens in the second half of the movie. Is there anything you’ve been thinking about since, or that you wish we could have talked about last week, now that this is a spoilers episode?

The second half of the film, for those who have seen it, is structured around trying to answer the mystery of whether Elizabeth knew that she and Billy were going to profit from the movie under the original deal Billy had reached with A24. I came away thinking there’s no way she didn’t know.

Mm-hmm.

I just don’t think it’s possible.

Maybe this is a good opportunity to get into some of the facts. One interesting reaction I’ve seen is that people who haven’t read Bad Blood—which I recommend everybody read; it’s a great book of reporting and a fascinating account of a particular culture in Silicon Valley during the years Theranos was around—aren’t necessarily as familiar with exactly what was going on at Theranos or with Elizabeth Holmes. We solicited a bunch of questions from the many people who were commenting and talking, and a lot of them had questions for you. Here’s one to start with, to give us a map on the ground. Ben Ryan asks, “What are the most unimpeachable pieces of evidence that Elizabeth Holmes is a fraudster?”

She gave media interviews and met with investors in 2014 and 2015, and represented very explicitly that she had a new technology, a new device that could do hundreds of blood tests from just one drop of blood pricked from a finger. The reality, shown by my reporting in the book and later confirmed at trial, was that they had a machine that could do 12 tests. That machine, called the Edison, was very faulty. They had to void every single one of those 12 types of tests for which they issued results. Every single result had to be voided. That’s how riddled with errors the machine was.

Tyler Shultz, one of the whistleblowers and one of my confidential sources at the time, is the grandson of former Secretary of State George Shultz. He pointed out on CBS This Morning yesterday that the machine she unpacks for Nathan Fielder, where you can see everything, isn’t the Edison. It’s a machine called the miniLab, the next iteration of the Theranos machine. It was supposed to cram more components into one device, do more tests, and have more capabilities. That machine was never finished. It never convincingly produced reliable test results, and they were never confident enough with it to use it—

Mm-hmm.

—on live patients. So there’s a bit of obfuscation and misleading going on in that scene when she unpacks the device. It’s not even the device they used on Theranos patients.

Yeah. Right. Can you talk a little bit about Tyler Shultz? He doesn’t come up in the movie at all, but he’s a main character in the story of Theranos and its decline and fall. How did you come to hear from him, and what was his role in your reporting and, further, in the fraud trial?

My first primary source—the first primary source I made contact with, whose real name I can now use after shielding his identity for years—was Adam Rosendorff, who shortly before he began talking to me was the clinical laboratory director at Theranos. When I started talking to him, I think in February 2015, he was terrified. I asked if there were other people who might be willing to talk to me, because I was looking for corroborating sources. In that very first conversation, he mentioned a young man named Tyler Shultz, who had left the company about eight months earlier. He had reason to believe Tyler had left on bad terms and had been raising questions, although he didn’t know the details.

He said, “You should look this kid up. And, oh, by the way, he’s George Shultz’s grandson.” The grandson of a very high-profile board member had left the company and potentially could be a corroborating source. That got my interest and attention, and I tried to get in touch with Tyler in the ensuing weeks. I wasn’t able to. I reached out to him through LinkedIn, and I don’t think I heard from him for about two months.

Then suddenly, one afternoon, I was at my desk in the Wall Street Journal newsroom in Midtown, and my phone rang.

Mm-hmm.

Out of the blue, I answered, and it was Tyler Shultz.

Tyler was in a fairly awkward position as a whistleblower who was also related to someone involved in the management of Theranos. One thing that maybe gets lost in the film a little bit is the extent to which Holmes and Theranos went after you and Shultz, and the lengths they went to to try to stop this story. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Tyler actually tried to blow the whistle to Elizabeth first. He tried to meet with her and tell her what was bothering him, and that didn’t go very well. She fobbed him off to Sunny, who got really angry with him, and to the lawyers. Then he tried to blow the whistle to his grandfather.

Mm-hmm.

His grandfather didn’t believe him and wouldn’t listen to him. Tyler ended up leaving the company after a little less than a year. When I started getting in touch with former and current Theranos employees, word got around among former employees, and Tyler got really concerned that if he contacted me, the company would somehow know. The threat of litigation was always in the air when you worked at Theranos.

I later learned that they had figured out who several of my sources were. They had ambushed Tyler at George Shultz’s house, which was on the Stanford campus, and tried to get him to admit he was speaking to me. They tried to get him to sign paperwork basically recanting, and to say who the other former employees were who were talking to me. From that point on, Tyler’s life became a nightmare.

Mm-hmm.

He had to get his own legal representation. His parents were almost bankrupted by the legal fees. That summer, he spent his nights sleeping with a knife under his pillow. He was afraid for his life. When I say she went after him, I’m not exaggerating. This was a ruthless cover-up, a ruthless attempt to prevent the truth from coming out.

We’re talking legal threats, intimidation. I know she even tried to get Rupert Murdoch to shut down the Wall Street Journal investigation.

That’s right. She appealed to Murdoch. At one point, I think in September 2015, we were less than a month from publishing the story, and she showed up in New York. She took the elevator to the eighth floor, where Murdoch had his office, and went to visit him. She had access because Murdoch had invested in Theranos. Unbeknownst to me at the time, he was Theranos’s single biggest investor. He had put in $125 million. She went to see him in the News Corp building, three floors up from where I was in the newsroom, and appealed to him to kill the story.

Let me get to another viewer question. The movie is constructed around encounters Nathan Fielder has with Elizabeth Holmes. In the first half, at least, he’s living in this beach house with her, and he’s trying to figure out who she is in some sense, whether she really believes what she’s saying. She both intentionally and maybe inadvertently tries to defend herself.

One of her defenses, which comes up in the film a few times, is that she was misled or framed by her boyfriend, Sunny Balwani, the chief operating officer. I have a question from a Twitter user named Mark B.: “Devil’s advocate: Is it possible that it was all Sunny? I’m genuinely asking.” What do you say, John?

No way. Sunny absolutely had a hand in this, but they ran this company as a couple.

Mm-hmm.

Probably the best way to understand that is to look at their texts.

Mm-hmm.

The government pulled thousands of their texts, spanning a number of years, essentially from when he joined Theranos in 2009 to 2015 or 2016. When you read those texts, you get the picture of a couple running this company together. They’re checking in with each other all the time. They’re doing everything together. This was a duo.

Mm-hmm.

You could certainly accuse Sunny of being a bad influence on her. You could also make the case that she was a bad influence on Sunny. But the notion that she wasn’t involved—

Mm-hmm.

—is farcical.

Yeah.

I would argue that the blame should be on her even a little bit more than on Sunny because she was CEO.

Right.

She was chairman of the board. She had voting rights that gave her something like 90% voting control of the company. She was at the controls of this thing.

Right.

And she was piloting the cover-up.

Yeah. Another defense that comes up in the movie is the idea that she never quite lied, but merely miscommunicated or communicated incorrectly. Was that a familiar defense to you? Is that something she had talked about before or used at trial? I’m thinking specifically of this scene we’ve already touched on, where she brings out the Edison, and she—

She brings out the miniLab.

Right. Exactly. She does not bring out the Edison.

That’s a problem. She doesn’t bring out the Edison.

She brings out the miniLab, and she effectively says that when she says this machine can do something, she doesn’t mean it literally can do it, but that someday, in some hypothetical way, it could do it, or something like that.

Yeah.

Was that a familiar defense to you?

I think it’s one of a panoply of defenses that she’s used. I can’t remember if she used it at trial or not, but the bottom line is the miniLab couldn’t do anything. I don’t think the miniLab had a single test ever validated on it. The whole debate they have over the meaning of the word “can” is beside the point. That machine couldn’t do anything.

Yeah. What did you make of the Abbott and Costello scene? This is another pivotal scene in the movie where Nathan shows her the classic Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on First?” He tries to get her to talk about what’s funny about it, and she says, “Oh, I find it funny,” but then she can’t figure out the name of the first baseman, which is obviously the whole premise of the joke. Do you think it’s possible that she actually didn’t understand?

I think she understood it and was playing dumb.

Yeah.

The reason for that is there was a sequence, either immediately before that one or the one before, where they’re sitting at the dining room table in the beach bungalow in San Diego. The pieces of the Theranos device are laid out in front of them, and Fielder floats the notion that she just interacts with the world differently.

Mm-hmm.

She sees the world differently, and perhaps that explains why statements she felt were innocent were interpreted by investors and others—doctors and patients—as lies. My interpretation is that she felt playing dumb about the Abbott and Costello routine in the next sequence would further that narrative: that she’s this neurodivergent, autistic entrepreneur who functions on a different wavelength.

Yeah.

She’s very calculating, and her calculus was, “Behaving this way helps me.”

Yeah.

“And it helps this narrative that Fielder himself floated, so that’s what I’m going to go with now.”

What makes you so sure of the calculation that’s going on there?

Because I’ve seen her be calculating for years now, in a bunch of different situations. I saw the way she responded to questions when she was interviewed for three days in a row by the SEC. I saw her testify on her own behalf at the trial. I saw how she responded to my stories back in late 2015. There was one incredibly telling moment: She came to the Wall Street Journal’s tech conference about 10 days after my first front-page story was published. She came out swinging and told some bald-faced lies—

Mm-hmm.

—in that appearance, and she knew exactly what she was doing.

Right. So you put no stock in the Fielder argument that maybe she sees the world differently, and we should give her a little bit of space for this different sense of the world?

I mostly don’t buy that, no.

Yeah.

I think that, for the most part, she knew exactly what she was doing when she was Theranos CEO.

Yeah.

She knew she was telling major lies.

Yeah.

And I just really don’t buy—

Yeah.

—that interpretation.

When you say “for the most part,” though, is there stuff you feel like you could chalk up to her being weird, for lack of a better word?

Well, this is the nuance. I don’t think she dropped out of Stanford as a sophomore with a plan to con investors, doctors, and patients. I think she really did want to found a company. She really did want to walk in the footsteps of Steve Jobs. She really did want to become a world-renowned, successful entrepreneur, and she thought and hoped that her idea would work.

I think what happened is that, in the years thereafter, she began cutting corners and telling lies when she needed to. It became a full-fledged fraud in fall 2013, when they went live with the blood tests in Walgreens stores and were absolutely not ready. They had an Edison machine that could do only a few tests and couldn’t do them well.

Mm-hmm.

They hacked these Siemens machines and used finger-stick samples on them. They pre-diluted the samples to make them big enough to run on the Siemens machines. That’s problematic because the protocol on the Siemens machines already dilutes the sample, so you’re double-diluting it, which can cause accuracy issues. The bottom line is, you’re not using your own technology. You’re using a 100-year-old German conglomerate’s machines that you’re slightly modifying.

I would date the moment when it became a giant fraud to fall 2013. But did she hope to succeed in earlier years? Yes. It wasn’t all a fraud from the beginning.

Yeah. Let me ask a question from Twitter. This is from a user called Inquisitive Mind: “Do you have any basic human sympathy for her? You’ve reframed her victims, and I understand that, but this is a woman who’s been through some rough things.”

Yes, I have sympathy for her. I think the U.S. justice system is really harsh. The U.S. criminal system is harsh. She got 11 years and 3 months, I think her sentence was, and that’s a pretty heavy sentence, perhaps out of whack with the crime.

I also felt sympathy for her seeing her in that bungalow with the kids, juggling the kids. There’s a scene I felt was very genuine, where I felt for her: Fielder is talking to Billy, and she’s in the foreground talking to her lawyers on the phone about what prison is going to be like.

Yeah.

You see her gradually break down in tears. I think those tears were very genuine, and I felt bad for her then.

Yeah. One of the remarkable things about the movie is that it’s a portrait that generates sympathy without removing any of the damning parts of what happened and why you would expect her to be in jail, I suppose. I do want to ask about Billy. I have a question from Ryan Parks on Twitter: “Do you think the husband is a mark or opportunist?”

I think he’s both.

Yeah.

I think she is using him. You can't tell me it's a coincidence that the first guy she dates seriously after the Theranos scandal has blown up and basically made her this notorious con woman is a very rich heir.

Yeah.

I think he's also an opportunist because you get the sense, as you watch the film, that he wants to capitalize on this opportunity. There are parts of him that are outraged by what she's gone through because he feels she's innocent. There are parts of him who love her and feel empathy for her, but there's also a part of him, I feel confident in saying, that does see an opportunity for his own career. They were hoping to make money off the film.

Right.

He's definitely an opportunist.

Yeah, I mean, that seems like one of the major themes of the second half of the movie: the many ways he's found opportunity, even as she's in prison, to make use of her image.

Yeah, I mean, the digital replica.

Yeah.

That right there feels exploitative.

Yeah. One response we got to the episode we recorded last week was a question about why we should still care about Elizabeth Holmes. I'm going to read a representative comment from Matt on the Times site: “Why can no one look away from Elizabeth Holmes? Because the media keeps throwing stories about her at me. Every time I see a headline, my first reaction is, ‘Who is this person again?’ And my second is, ‘Why are we still talking about her?’”

We talked a little last week about why Elizabeth Holmes is a fascinating cultural figure, and you in fact wrote a great piece on the subject, too, that's available in the Times app. But I'm also wondering if you think we should stop talking about her. Is there a case for her continued relevance as a news story?

First of all, I'll remind everyone why we're talking about her. We're talking about her because she invited these filmmakers into her home 34 days before going to prison to retell the story, rewrite history, and have people feel sorry for her. That's why we're talking about her. She did this.

Mm-hmm.

She's the one who made this moment happen. I suspect it hasn't panned out exactly the way she hoped, because I do think this film is damning in its own way. It's a terrific movie. It's a terrific piece of art, but I think it really doesn't make her or Billy look good.

Yeah.

But I keep coming back to the fact that she's the one who is making us talk about her.

Mm-hmm.

She's the one who's not going away.

Yeah. Okay, let me ask one final question. This is also from Corey O'Neill on Twitter. Corey writes, “Judge Davila asked whether the pathology of fraud is the inability or refusal to accept responsibility. After years of investigating Holmes, do you think someone can evade reality so persistently that a conscious refusal eventually becomes a genuine inability to recognize reality?”

Again, I don't buy the narrative that she doesn't know she lied and that she doesn't know she did wrong. I think she does.

Mm-hmm.

But she's continuing to put on the act that she didn't do anything wrong and that, whether or not you believe she did, she doesn't believe she did anything wrong.

Yeah.

I think Judge Davila was incredibly wise when he made that statement during her sentencing. This is someone who had many, many, many opportunities to take responsibility or partial responsibility, show contrition, admit that she could have done things differently, and feel sorry for the patients whose lives she impacted, employees, doctors, and investors. She never once did that.

I was at her sentencing hearing, and when Davila uttered those words, I wrote the quote down verbatim in my notebook. Then I used it in the epilogue I wrote for the book. I wrote an epilogue after the sentencing hearing, a long one, chapter length, and I used that Davila quote because I thought it really encapsulated her mind, her psychology, and her refusal to take responsibility.

Well, that's a great note to end on. John, thank you for joining us again. I have to recommend that Hard Fork listeners, our audience, read Bad Blood. If you've seen this movie, if you haven't seen this movie, it's a great work of journalism, a great work of nonfiction. Thanks again for coming on.

Thanks for having me.