Itâs not every day where we are able to see a powerful female CEO at the head of industry. Even today, only 8-11% of women hold CEO positions in the workplace. In fact, for the first time in two decades, the percentage of women holding C-suite roles has dropped from 12.2% in 2022 to 11.8% in 2023. So, as a woman who holds her femininity very close to her, I always root for a woman to succeed, like Rihanna, the founder and part-owner of Fenty Beauty or Sara Blakely, a self-made entrepreneur and the founder of Spanx.
However, I can concede that this internal pride and bias sometimes leads me to being lenient of morally-gray areas for women in powerful positions. This only makes it so much harder to watch and see when a woman who finally makes it to the top have such a horrible fall from grace.
This is the case with Elizabeth Holmes. She could have had it all. The 19-year old founder of Theranos had the drive, youth, passion, and ingenuity to succeed. Theranos, founded in 2003, was created to disrupt the medical diagnostics industry, marketing itself as a revolutionary in in blood testing. Using patented Nanotainer technology, the machines (later deemed âEdisonâ machines) were supposed to be able to run hundreds of blood tests using only a single prick of blood, eliminating the use for long blood drives.
The company blew up and ended up at peak about 10 years after its launch, and Holmes, at the height of her career, had a net worth of $4.5B and Theranos was worth $9B. However, it was soon brought to light in 2015, that her whole career and business were fraudulent. Behind the scenes, her ârevolutionaryâ Edison technology didnât work. She ran patient tests on standard, commercial equipment from other manufacturers while faking the origins and results.Â
The new movie about this case titled You Can See Everything hit theaters October 16th, and is the perfect documentary film to get you thinking. For those who have not seen it, I will keep this review spoiler-free, especially because that is also the wishes of the director! But, I know that when I saw it, my head was spinning. Even though I knew about her extortion and fraudulent business, and her manipulative depiction as simultaneously innocent and a genius entrepreneur, there was still a part of me that wanted to root for her. After all, she was self-made in a STEM industry dominated by men, with technology thatâin theoryâwould save countless lives. With tech like that, people donât want to question if it truly has the ability to work or not, because we simply wish it would.
And that is what made her such a genius. By playing into our hopes for a better future, she was able to consistently get away with faking her business. But what is also important to note is that she is still fullheartedly committed to it as well. Amanda Seyfried played Holmes in a Hulu adaptation in 2022, but what makes this version so different, is that it is a true documentary filmed at the prison that Holmes has been in for the past 11 years.
The director, Nathan Fielder, traveled to her prison to specifically ask for her version of the story right before her relocation to a federal Texas penitentiary. The biggest shock? The fact that Holmes still believes in her innocence. Throughout his questioning at the prison, she would consistently back up her belief in Theranos, saying that âTheranos has the ability to diagnose hundreds of illnessesâ. In theory, yes, this is true. But there’s one key detail that makes that claim so infeasible: Yes, the idea is great, but the tech does not exist. So, creating a company built to take advantage of this hope is so explicitly immoral.
That being said, this documentary was cringey, ironic, humorous, and lets you truly see into the mind of Elizabeth Holmes in a way that we havenât been able to observe since before her sentence. It is a must-watch, and I am itching to talk about all the conspiracy theories and other unanswered questions I still have.Â
So get some friends, buy some overpriced, hot, buttery popcorn at the theaters, drink a crisp soda, and open your mind to the documentary of the year, You Can See Everything!