Is Elizabeth Holmes intentionally deceptive?

Elizabeth Holmes was a 19-year-old Stanford University dropout in 2003 when she founded a company called Theranos. With a goal of revolutionizing the blood-testing industry, she raised $900 million from investors, and the company was eventually valued at $9 billion. Elizabeth was touted as the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire. 

But the Theranos technology never worked as advertised. In 2022, Elizabeth was convicted of defrauding investors. 

I was vaguely familiar with this backstory when I watched the new documentary about her called, You Can See Everything. Audiences are buzzing about the movie — some say it should be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, and a documentary has never been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. 

Here’s the basic question posed by the movie: Is Elizabeth Holmes intentionally deceptive?

After watching the movie, listening to 26 episodes of an ABC news podcast about the saga and additional research, all I can say is I don’t know.

Here’s another question of interest to the Lovefraud audience: Is Elizabeth Holmes a sociopath? I don’t know that either. 

Fame, fortune and Elizabeth Holmes

At the height of the company’s fame, Elizabeth was featured on the covers of Forbes, Fortune, Inc. and other publications, wearing her signature black turtleneck. She was interviewed on TV and honored at award ceremonies. She was lauded as the next Steve Jobs. 

But in 2015, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the company’s cutting-edge blood-testing machines did not work. Then the federal government uncovered irregularities at its lab. Many customers were receiving inaccurate blood tests, and the company lost its biggest customer, Walgreens Pharmacy. Theranos was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and sued by investors.

The company was falling apart, but Elizabeth Holmes denied any wrongdoing.

John Carreyrou wrote the Wall Street Journal article that instigated the Theranos collapse. Then he wrote a book about his investigation. Here’s what Carreyrou said in an interview with Vanity Fair:

“At the end of my book, I say that a sociopath is described as someone with no conscience. I think she absolutely has sociopathic tendencies. One of those tendencies is pathological lying. I believe this is a woman who started telling small lies soon after she dropped out of Stanford, when she founded her company, and the lies became bigger and bigger. I think she’s someone that got used to telling lies so often, and the lies got so much bigger, that eventually the line between the lies and reality blurred for her.”

Indicted by the federal government

Then Holmes faced even bigger problems — she was indicted by the federal government and charged with defrauding investors, doctors and patients. According to the ABC News podcast, called The Dropout, evidence of her fraud included:

• Claiming Theranos machines could run more than 200 blood tests, when the most they could ever run was 12.
• Claiming Theranos only needed a tiny pinprick of the patient’s blood, when its tests often required standard venous blood draws.
• Claiming Theranos machines were deployed in Afghanistan — untrue.
• Claiming Theranos machines were used in medivac helicopters — never happened.
• Claiming big pharma companies like Pfizer and Schering Plough validated the Theranos process — they did not, even though Elizabeth slapped the companies’ logos on doctored documents.
• Claiming Theranos would earn $100 million in one year. Actual revenue was $100,000.

According to court testimony, when Theranos employees brought up concerns about problems in the company’s labs and products, they were fired. Young whistleblowers who talked to the Wall Street Journal reporter, including Tyler Schultz, were fired, threatened and followed. 

When the company’s chief scientist, who also voiced misgivings about the lab results, committed suicide, Elizabeth Holmes did not express sympathy to his widow. She demanded the return of all his Theranos papers.

Yet Elizabeth proclaimed her innocence. She said she relied on information provided to her by the company’s lab directors and other employees. She blamed former employees — especially the company’s chief operating officer, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, with whom she had a romantic relationship. She said that the investors should have done more due diligence. 

On camera before prison

Elizabeth was convicted of defrauding investors in early 2022 and sentenced to 11 years in prison. This brings us to the new documentary, You Can See Everything, co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.

While she was under indictment, Elizabeth met Billy Evans, who was 10 years younger and from a wealthy family. They had two children together. Evans was supportive of Elizabeth during her trial and appears in the new documentary. 

Thirty-four days before Elizabeth was supposed to report to federal prison, Fielder and a camera crew moved into the home she shared with Evans and their children. The cameras recorded incredibly intimate moments, as Fielder tried to figure out if Elizabeth was telling the truth.

One scene highlighted in the official trailer explores the question. An extreme close-up of Elizabeth’s face fills the screen, her big blue eyes unblinking. She says to Fielder:

“I don’t have anything to deceive you on — of course I’m not deceiving you,” she says. “I’m engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you?”

Tyler Schultz, the whistleblower, saw the movie. In one scene, Elizabeth showed Fielder the Theranos machine. Schultz was outraged. He said it was not the machine that he worked on, that was hidden from regulators and failed quality controls. 

Is Elizabeth Holmes intentionally deceptive?

So is Elizabeth Holmes intentionally deceptive? And is she a sociopath?

After my marriage to a sociopath, and 21 years of listening to other people’s stories of sociopathic manipulation, I understand sociopaths. I understand how people’s life experiences make them vulnerable to sociopaths. And I understand how people can fall for and believe sociopaths, and how they come to share the sociopath’s worldview. 

So I researched more about Elizabeth Holmes’ background. Here are a few nuggets:

According to Forbes, a psychiatrist who knew Elizabeth since she was a child said she was emotionally withdrawn and was pushed hard by her jealous mother. 

In The Dropout podcast, a sixth-grade classmate of Elizabeth Holmes remembered her as polite and engaging but disconnected from the larger group of girls. She didn’t socialize; she was always working on something. In high school, she didn’t mingle with students in the lunchroom and didn’t attend school dances.

When Elizabeth was 18, she went to China through a Stanford University language program. According to the psychiatrist, Elizabeth was not happy. She called her mother crying — the people in China were dirty, the hotel was filthy and she wanted to come home. Her mother told her to stop complaining and get with the program.

In China Elizabeth met “Sunny” Balwani, who was 38 and a successful software entrepreneur. They stayed in touch after Elizabeth started college.

In bombshell court testimony, Elizabeth said was raped at Stanford. She decided to leave college to start her company.

According to The Dropout podcast, Elizabeth asked Balwani for advice, and eventually they became romantically involved. Although they were together for about 10 years, in her court testimony Elizabeth accused Balwani of emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

Criticism by her partner, Sunny Balwani

Elizabeth testified that Balwani said she was mediocre. She needed to kill the person she was and create a new Elizabeth who could be a successful entrepreneur. 

“He said I needed to spend all of my time on the business and that I should only be spending time with people who could help the business to be successful,” she testified. “I needed to be in the office seven days a week. And I needed to be only doing things that could contribute to making the company successful. Which meant not sleeping very much.”

According to trial evidence, Balwani told Elizabeth she needed to learn what makes people tick and use it as bait to motivate them. She should also create a file for each person she dealt with.

What does all this mean? Elizabeth was an emotionally withdrawn child with a pushy mother who did not socialize in high school. People with this background are often vulnerable to social predators.

At 18 she goes to China, which she hates. There, she met Sunny Balwani, who was almost 20 years older. Their romantic relationship was characterized by an extreme power differential — she was a naïve young girl and he was an older, powerful businessman pushing her to change herself.

As the Lovefraud contributor Dr. Liane Leedom explains, sociopaths have a cold, calculating view of the world, and their victims often take on that worldview. Did Elizabeth’s upbringing make her vulnerable to control, and did she then behave as she was trained to behave by Balwani?

New partner Billy Evans

According to Dr. Leedom, people who have been victimized by one sociopath are frequently vulnerable to victimization by another sociopath.

The documentary provides us with an in-depth look at Elizabeth’s life before going to prison. She appears to be warm, caring — and manipulated by Evans. Here’s how one film review described her partner and the father of her children:

“At first, Evans comes off as the kind of normcore-clad tech bro cretin with an unearned confidence and no discernible expertise beyond a vague background in business we see all too often today. But as the documentary goes on, he takes on an increasingly dark aura so that by the time everything is said and done he’s managed to become a genuinely sinister and malevolent presence.”

Evans’ treatment of Elizabeth looks like sociopathic control. Early in the movie, he criticizes how she scrambles eggs. He interrupts Elizabeth’s interviews. When she’s in prison, Evans tries to prevent Fielder from interviewing her again. He takes over Elizabeth’s Twitter account. He claims to know what is in her mind.

Elizabeth doesn’t push back. If she were truly a sociopath, would she allow herself to be so dominated? I doubt it.

Is Elizabeth a victim or a sociopath?

Elizabeth Holmes surrendered to prison on April 27, 2023. Sociopaths typically view prison as just another opportunity to run a scam. But according to the Daily Mail, Holmes has proven popular with fellow prisoners and guards alike due to her politeness and willingness to help. She sees her children almost every weekend, keeps her head down and has never traded on her fame to get special treatment.

Is that sociopathic behavior? No. So what’s going on?

Nathan Fielder, in the documentary, was confused. Elizabeth Holmes had obviously lied about her company’s capabilities, but with apparently no guile at all, claimed she was really talking about what the company could potentially do in the future.

Fielder said he felt like he was in the Abbott and Costello comedy routine, “Who’s on First?” Elizabeth had never heard of the classic sketch, so Fielder showed her a video. 

Elizabeth smiled, but she did not get the joke. She could not explain the confusion and why the skit was funny.

After that point of the documentary, I began wondering if Elizabeth was somewhere on the autism spectrum. She was obviously smart and focused, but maybe her ability to interpret social interactions was deficient. That would have made her vulnerable to manipulation by both Sunny Balwani and Billy Evans, and susceptible to taking on their worldviews as her own.

Or, like many sociopaths, Elizabeth is really, really good at deception. I still don’t know.

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