You Can See Everything starts after the verdict. Elizabeth Holmes was already convicted and sentenced when she invited a crew in, 34 days before she was due to enter prison in 2023. The company whose story made her famous had been winding down since 2018. That gap is the key to the film’s setup. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim started with a subject who knew what the jury had decided and still had time to make a case for how she wanted to be seen.
2003–2015: What Theranos promised
Holmes founded Theranos in 2003. The company marketed the possibility of using a finger prick in place of a larger draw from a vein. A smaller sample was part of the appeal. The bigger promise was that Theranos’s portable analyzer could run a broad menu of tests from that small sample. Those are separate claims. Collecting a few drops and reliably running the advertised tests on them are two different jobs.
Theranos brought its tests to retail through a Walgreens partnership, with a public launch in 2013. The company developed about 300 tests for small samples, but only twelve were ever run on its proprietary Edison analyzer, according to the appeals court’s account. The lab ran other tests on third-party instruments, some of them modified. Investors who testified said they believed Theranos was running the tests on its own machines.
How did the investor materials suggest outside validation?
The appeals court’s account of the trial says Holmes acknowledged adding pharmaceutical company logos to reports about Theranos’s technology. Representatives from those companies testified that they had neither independently validated the device nor authorized the logos. An investor reading the reports could easily have understood the brands to be vouching for the machine.
2015–2018: Reporting, lab sanctions and dissolution
September 2015. An FDA inspection of Theranos’s Newark, California facility flagged an uncleared blood collection device being shipped across state lines and problems with how the company handled complaints. The form records inspectors’ observations at that point.
October 2015. John Carreyrou’s investigation in The Wall Street Journal challenged what Theranos said its machine was doing. The reporting traced the gap between the tests on offer and the share the company ran on its proprietary equipment.
May and June 2016. Theranos voided two years of Edison test results in May. Walgreens ended its agreement the following month.
July 2016. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services imposed sanctions on the Newark lab, including revocation of its CLIA certificate. The FDA observations concerned devices and manufacturing practices. The CMS action dealt with the clinical laboratory’s authority to run tests.
March 2018. The SEC filed civil fraud charges, alleging that Theranos, Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani raised more than $700 million from investors through misleading claims. Holmes settled without admitting or denying the allegations, agreed to a $500,000 penalty and agreed to a ten-year bar on serving as an officer or director of a public company.
June–September 2018. Federal prosecutors brought criminal charges against Holmes and Balwani in June. In September, Theranos CEO David Taylor told stockholders that the company planned to dissolve. The corporation’s wind-down and the criminal case proceeded on different timelines.
2022–2026: The verdict and the revised sentence
The January 3, 2022 verdict concerned two groups of alleged victims, investors and patients. Holmes’s four convictions were all investor-related. The Ninth Circuit’s breakdown of the counts shows why the outcome is more specific than a blanket fraud verdict.
| Counts | What happened |
|---|---|
| Investor conspiracy, count 1 | Guilty |
| Investor wire fraud, counts 6–8 | Guilty on all three |
| Investor wire fraud, counts 3–5 | The jury could not reach a verdict on those three |
| Patient conspiracy and wire fraud, counts 2 and 10–12 | Acquitted on all four |
| Patient wire fraud, count 9 | The government dismissed the count during trial |
Balwani faced a separate trial. His jury found him guilty on all twelve counts, including patient-related charges. The result in his trial belongs to his own case.
Holmes received 135 months in prison on November 18, 2022, and began serving the sentence on May 30, 2023. In February 2025 the Ninth Circuit upheld the convictions, sentences and roughly $452 million joint restitution order. It denied Holmes’s request for rehearing in May and published an amended opinion in December.
A later district court order on March 26, 2026 shortened her term to 123 months after applying a retroactive change to federal sentencing guidelines. The 135-month figure is the original sentence. The 2026 order changed the prison term and left the convictions in place.
2023 footage, 2026 film
A24 credits Fielder and Oppenheim as co-directors and dates the US theatrical release to October 16, 2026. The first access to Holmes took place in the run-up to her 2023 surrender. The film was seen at Telluride in September 2026, before that October theatrical date. The October date belongs to the public release. The house footage began more than three years earlier.
If you want to follow the people who tested the company’s claims, go to Carreyrou’s reporting or Rebecca Jarvis’s The Dropout podcast. The Hulu series of the same name dramatizes the story with Amanda Seyfried playing Holmes. You Can See Everything gives viewers a convicted subject speaking for herself as a film crew watches. For how that setup fits Fielder’s work, see our Nathan Fielder watch guide.