Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz says Elizabeth Holmes looks like ‘a broken woman’ in documentary

Tyler Shultz, a former Theranos employee and one of the whistleblowers credited with blowing the whistle Elizabeth Holmes’ now famous biotechnology company as a fraud, said he “was pretty shocked” by the version of Holmes he saw on screen in the new documentary “You Can See Everything.”

“The Elizabeth that I knew completely commanded a room, even if that room was full of secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, generals, senators. She would own a room,” Shultz said Monday on “CBS Mornings.” “She had so much confidence in herself and the woman I saw on screen honestly looked like a broken woman.”

“It was almost unrecognizable,” he added.

Shultz also said he believed Holmes misled Nathan Fielder, who directed the documentary alongside Lance Oppenheim, when at one point in the film she pulled out what she claimed was Theranos’ blood testing device.

“She takes out the Theranos device and puts it on the table with all of its components, so you know you can see everything,” Shultz said. “But my problem was this: It wasn’t the device I worked with 12 hours a day. It wasn’t the device we hid from regulators.

Holmes never admitted to any wrongdoing following the Theranos scandala position she held firm on in the documentary that takes viewers to Holmes’ San Diego rental property in 2023 just weeks before his 11-year prison sentence begins. At the time, she was living with her partner, Billy Evans, who also features prominently in the documentary, and their two children.

Holmes was convicted in 2022 of multiple counts of defrauding Theranos investors, who, like the public, were led to believe that the company could perform in-depth clinical analyzes on tiny blood samples taken from a fingertip rather than collected in the traditional manner. The technology has been touted as revelatory in the field of diagnostics, increasing access and costs of crucial, even life-saving, tests.

But Theranos turned out to be a sham: the technology couldn’t do what it claimed. And Holmes, who had become a symbol of Silicon Valley’s visionary potential, became the subject of intense scrutiny as people questioned how she had managed to fool so many people and why she had spent so much effort trying to build a company on false promises.

“She knows she did something wrong,” Shultz said Monday. “She knows she was lying, because she created a whole web of lies that you wouldn’t have needed to create if you actually believed those lies.”

Shultz was hired in 2013 as an intern at Theranos, where his grandfather, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, was a board member. Tyler left the company the following year and continued to serve as an informant in investigations into its questionable practices by the Wall Street Journal and various government regulatory agencies. He later participated in the 2016 HBO documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” which covered the fall of Theranos.

“You Can See Everything” premiered Friday and grossed $15 million at the box office in its opening weekend, the second highest-grossing opening weekend ever for a documentary.