Shultz says Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes movie, You Can See Everything, is not a documentary and still leaves viewers with the wrong picture of Theranos. In his essay, the former employee and whistleblower argues that the three-hour film turns a fraud case into an art object without fully showing what was at stake.
“You Can See Everything is a hilarious, thrilling, fascinating, beautiful piece of art. What it certainly is not is a documentary, and it’s dangerous to pretend that it is.” That opening line does the heavy lifting: Shultz is not rejecting the film’s craft, he is rejecting its truth claim.
San Diego condo focus
The film follows Elizabeth Holmes and Billy in the small condo they were renting in San Diego, and Shultz says it rarely moves beyond those walls. That narrow frame matters because the story it presents is less about the machinery of Theranos than about the room where the camera stays, which lets the film turn the case into a debate over atmosphere instead of evidence.
Inside that condo scene, the device is taken apart, exploded into components, and laid out on the kitchen table. Elizabeth Holmes argues that it could run any test if the chemistries for those tests had been developed, and Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes linger on the word “can.”
Shultz and the device
Shultz, who says he worked with the device 12 hours a day, says the one on the kitchen table was not the machine he knew. He says that version was hidden from regulators, constantly failed quality controls, and was used to knowingly give patients inaccurate medical results.
He also says the device shown in the film was a future version of the Theranos product that was never completed and never used. His sharper version of the title, “You Can See Everything That We Chose To Point The Camera At,” gets at the same point: the film’s frame is selective, and selection changes the story.
Holmes, Carreyrou, and doubt
Shultz says he met Elizabeth Holmes when he was 20 and that she went to prison when he was 32. He also says his grandfather sat on her board, that she came to family holidays and birthday parties, and that he once told John Carreyrou, “Do not underestimate Elizabeth Holmes.”
That personal history gives his criticism weight, but the central clash is simpler: the film invites doubt about whether Holmes lied, while Shultz says the device on the table was not the real reason she went to prison and was never completed or used. He says he wanted to shout “THAT IS NOT THE DEVICE.” in the theater, and that is the line that lingers after the credits would have rolled.
For viewers, the practical takeaway is blunt: treat You Can See Everything as a stylized retelling, not a documentary record of Theranos. The movie may lean on ambiguity, but Shultz’s account says the larger fraud does not disappear just because the camera stays in one condo.
