My friend, the scientist/poet Terry Sloan, tells me I have to go see the new documentary, “You Can See Everything.”
The film is a meeting of two consummate bullshitters: Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder. Holmes, once hailed as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, is now serving an 11-plus year term in the federal pen for fraud. Fielder, a TV show host whose immensely popular “Nathan For You” docu-reality stunt series featured him giving aspiring small business start-ups absurd advice, cut his undercover documentary teeth working with Sasha Baron Cohen to co-produce the mockumentary series, “Who Is America?” He directed and prominently appears in the film.
The gist of “You Can See Everything” is what happens when two people who’ve made their livings misrepresenting themselves spend a month in each other’s company? Is it a critical mass of charlatanism? A nuclear explosion of chicanery? A fission or fusion of bunk?
Every media outlet on the planet, it seems, from legacy newspapers and magazines to internet influencers’ YouTube channels, is bursting with posts, articles, pontifications, op/eds, accolades, warnings, hosannas, and what-does-it-all-mean-about-America navel gazings.
I remember reading about Elizabeth Holmes and her company, Theranos, back in the mid- to late-teens when she, and it, were revealed to be scams of monumental proportions. Theranos, in case you’ve been living off the grid for the last decade, was the erstwhile revolutionary medical start-up that devised and sold a diagnostic testing procedure that could take a tiny drop from a fingerprick — rather than the unwieldy bundles of test tubes filled with blood the new procedure was touted to replace — and tell patients if they had cancer, AIDS, high cholesterol, diabetes, hypo- and hyperthyroidism, and more. In fact, Holmes claimed her innovative process could diagnose some 250 maladies and conditions. And she started the company when she was 19 years old. Wow!
Being regularly monitored for my too-many-to-count afflictions, I, for one, would be thrilled to forgo getting stuck and drained of blood every few months. Prick my finger and let me dance happily off!
Holmes raised nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars from investors, including heavy-hitters like former US Secretaries of State George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, former US Senate Majority Leader (and himself a heart surgeon) Bill Frist, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, and the DeVos and Walton family trusts. She and her minions rasied enough dough to garner a $9 billion dollar valuation for her company. By golly, Elizabeth Holmes had to be one hell of a salesperson.
Or a liar.
It turned out her pinprick was a giant con. Whistleblowers on the inside of Theranos and investigative journalists found her innovation really didn’t work. And she knew it.
Holmes was found guilty of defrauding investors in 2022 by a San Jose, California federal jury. For pity’s sake, you take heavy hitters like she did to the cleaners and you’re just itching to pay the maximum price for your sin.
Funny thing is, a whole hell of a lot of little people also got defrauded. One of the whistle-blowers said:
We told people they had HIV when they did not. We told people they had cancer when they did not. We told expecting mothers that they had lost their unborn child when they had not.
Only the jury didn’t find for them. And that, more than anything else in the Elizabeth Holes case, speaks volumes about America. If you’re rich enough to be able to throw a few tens of millions at her because she’s a young, pretty, doe-eyed blonde who batted her eyelashes at you, you’ll be made whole in a court of law.
If you’re an anonymous consumer who couldn’t sleep at night for weeks on end because you were wrongly informed you had cancer or AIDS, well, that’s a shame. But there ain’t nothin’ in the settlement pot for you.