Third-Most-Insane Detail
Last updated: 10/25/2026 | Originally published: 10/25/2026
I, somehow, completely missed the Theranos story when it was happening. Blame my university education in far-off Canada, perhaps, which happened to coincide with the release of John Carreyrou’s articles that exposed the fraud. In any case, by the time I came to the Bay Area in 2019, Elizabeth Holmes was a half-forgotten cautionary tale, shared in whispered anecdotes of can you believe she almost got away with it?
Anyway, with the release of You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s purportedly-absolutely-insane1 I am not seeing it until Tuesday, though I have high hopes. documentary about Holmes’ last days of freedom, Theranos is back in the news. So I decided to finally catch up by reading Bad Blood, the book-length version of John Carreyrou’s reporting, and watching The Dropout, the acclaimed miniseries2 Which is not, strictly speaking, based on Bad Blood, instead being based on an ABC News podcast, though given it’s all a true story it covers largely the same ground. starring Amanda Seyfried.
They are both, in short, highly recommended — Bad Blood because it’s a deeply reported true crime story, and The Dropout because it turns that true crime story into a thrilling, and surprisingly funny, black comedy heist caper with some truly outstanding performances. Even if you are deeply, deeply tired of stories about problematic founders, both are deeply enjoyable in the same way as, say, Ocean’s Eleven — you’re constantly asking how is she going to get out of it this time? as Elizabeth digs herself deeper and deeper.
One thing that’s surprising about both accounts is just how difficult it was to expose Holmes. Surprising because, contrary to the Holmes apologists, Theranos really didn’t have anything. There was no radical technological breakthrough. There wasn’t even a logistical breakthrough, a la Uber! Theranos really had nothing all along; their ultimate product, as deployed in a few Walgreens stores in Arizona, was essentially “ship diluted blood back to Palo Alto, run tests on a third-party machine, and report the no-longer-valid results”. It seems like, at some point, someone should have noticed. And, as Bad Blood exhaustively details, many people did notice over the years. But somehow it never quite became common knowledge, in a way that finally took Holmes down, until a flashy Wall Street Journal article that very nearly didn’t happen. Lose a handful of key sources like Tyler Schultz and Erika Cheung and there’s no article, and then, well… how much longer could she have gotten away with it? Surely at some point it would have blown up in their face… right?
One key piece of the puzzle, which Bad Blood heavily emphasizes and The Dropout does somewhat less so, is the extreme paranoia under which Theranos operated. Employees from different departments were actively discouraged from talking to one another, with badge access required for most of the office. Security monitored all electronic communications. Dismissals were done abruptly and secretively. Armed guards followed Holmes everywhere she went. Her most important lieutenants were chosen based on loyalty rather than competence. The culture was dominated by Holmes’ insistence that Big Lab was engaged in corporate espionage, leading to a cult-like insistence on belief in Holmes. And, of course, everything was aggressively protected by NDAs and trade secret law, with America’s at-the-time-most-famous lawyer hounding anyone that looked remotely disgruntled.
Sometimes I wonder how a Stalinist Russia or a North Korea happens. How do you end up with a society that dysfunctional, that paranoid? Cults are a good comparison, but Theranos is arguably even better: a company full of people that genuinely wanted to help people, normal people, who just thought they were working a job, which nevertheless somehow became a cult.
Probably the most insane detail of the entire Theranos story, speaking as someone that grew up a 15 minute drive from Walgreens’ corporate headquarters, is that Walgreens actually deployed Theranos to patients in stores. Theranos wasn’t vaporware. They really did have a “product”, of sorts, that some customers actually used — it’s just that that product didn’t do anything at all. For some reason, I had always thought Theranos was primarily a financial scam, milking a few billion dollars of wasted R&D out of VCs. But, no, as both Bad Blood and The Dropout are at pains to emphasize, Holmes’ crime was not (just) defrauding investors, but instead recklessly deploying Theranos’ (nonexistent) technology in a way that directly put patients at risk.
The second-most-insane detail, passed over by The Dropout but explored in some detail in Bad Blood, is that Elizabeth Holmes somehow convinced most of her investors that Theranos was being used on American military helicopters in Afghanistan, even though it just… wasn’t? And then somehow managed to convince a pre-Trump-voice-of-reason General Jim Mattis to join her board?
The third-most-insane detail, as Hank Green explores in great detail, is that “taking too much blood for blood tests” is just not an issue. Like, except in very specific ICU circumstances, it is basically impossible for blood tests to take a clinically significant amount of blood. Also, labs apparently could just use less blood, but labs happen to draw the amount of blood they do because of complicated path-dependent reasons with the machines they use. So Theranos’ whole pitch (which was, admittedly, very different from their original pitch, of doing therapy and diagnosis in a single patch) is basically nonsensical (at least, per Hank Green). Anyway, the video is a bit long and very much for the science nerds (although his point is that… maybe… sometimes you should listen to the science nerds) but I’m now deep enough into this story that I literally squealed when I saw who his special guest was.
I mentioned this above, but let me emphasize: the widespread praise for Amanda Seyfried’s performance as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout is well-deserved and career-defining. She captures the sheer captivating oddness of Holmes, a chameleon completely willing to change her voice and mannerisms and even sense of self in pursuit of her goals, able to captivate nearly anyone with a piercing stare. Amanda Seyfried is basically perfect for the role, with those big doe-y eyes. You can definitely see how Nathan Fielder of all people could watch this show and think I want to make a documentary about the woman this is based on.
But I also credit Naveen Andrews as her partner-in-crime Sunny Balwani; at least in the context of the show, he’s pretty much perfect as a petty bully that wants control but doesn’t quite know how to take it, who has more money than sense and seems to think he can just yell his way out of every situation. One of the funniest scenes in the entire series is in episode 2, as Holmes panics about dropping out to start Theranos, and Andrews’ bathrobe-clad Balwani tries to calm her down… by showing off his new katana.
I keep emphasizing how funny The Dropout is, and while it doesn’t always land, I did laugh out loud at least once an episode, which is better than some actual comedies I’ve seen. Despite how critically acclaimed the show is, it never quite seems to have reached household-name status, which is a shame, because there’s so many scenes that are eternally memeable. (“Drink the fucking juice!!”)
A friend pointed out that she’s extremely tired of “bad CEO” stories. Haven’t we all already seen The Social Network? Don’t we know that tech CEOs are mostly bad people? Or, for those that still love Elon Musk, is there anything that would convince them?
I don’t really have a good answer. I’m hoping that You Can See Everything is a rich, multivalent text, but I have to admit I’ve been spending so much time with Theranos just because the story is so wild, even wilder than I realized when I thought it was “just” some financial fraud. And that’s kind of fun! But, maybe, not the best use of my time. I have no justification.
Also, to those who reached out: yes, I’m doing much better this week; no, there’s nothing to worry about.