Why I refuse to judge Elizabeth Holmes's performance art by FDA standards

The discourse around Nathan Fielder’s "You Can See Everything" has predictably sent John Carreyrou’s eight-year-old book "Bad Blood" surging back to the top of the Amazon charts. Audiences are once again reliving the spectacular implosion of Theranos, the blood-testing startup that promised to revolutionize medicine but instead delivered a masterclass in corporate deceit. But as I watched the documentary from the comfort of a private screening room in Tribeca, nursing a remarkably earthy kombucha, it struck me that we are still judging a visionary through entirely the wrong lens.

I was discussing this over a branzino at San Vicente Bungalows last Tuesday with a prominent showrunner, whose current overall deal at a major streamer I am not at liberty to disclose, though let us just say he knows a thing or two about multi-season arcs. We both agreed that the fatal flaw in the public’s understanding of Holmes is the rigid insistence on treating her as a healthcare professional. She was never a CEO. She was an auteur. And Theranos was not a medical device company; it was the most ambitious, immersive piece of durational performance art of the decade.

Once you stop demanding that the Edison machine accurately diagnose syphilis and start viewing it as a minimalist prop in a sweeping satire of venture capital, the sheer scale of her genius becomes undeniable. Holmes didn't just pitch a startup. She built an entire cinematic universe, complete with rigorous costume design centered on those iconic black turtlenecks, a carefully modulated vocal performance that never wavered, and a staggering commitment to the bit.

Consider the board of directors she assembled. George Shultz. Henry Kissinger. General Jim Mattis. To the untrained eye, this looks like a cynical shield of credibility designed to deflect regulatory scrutiny. But to anyone who understands the entertainment industry, it is a casting triumph. Getting the architects of the Cold War and the War on Terror to sit around a boardroom table in Palo Alto and solemnly nod at a hollow plastic box that supposedly ran two hundred blood tests on a single drop is a level of biting, absurdist theater that Fielder himself could only dream of orchestrating. She turned the American military-industrial complex into her own personal improv troupe.

The complaints from the so-called victims of this enterprise have always felt remarkably short-sighted to me. Yes, I understand that patients at Walgreens wellness centers in Arizona received wildly inaccurate medical data. But art is meant to be disruptive. It is meant to challenge our preconceived notions of reality and blood chemistry. It is frankly a bit entitled of these suburban shoppers to complain about their false potassium levels when they were being given front-row, interactive roles in the defining avant-garde masterpiece of our generation. They didn't have to pay Broadway prices, and yet they got to experience genuine existential dread.

That is the fundamental tragedy of John Carreyrou’s "Bad Blood." Carreyrou approached the story with the pedestrian, literal-minded rigidity of a financial reporter. He acted like a theater critic who walks into a production of "Hamlet" and immediately files a consumer protection complaint because the poison was not approved by the FDA. By obsessing over tedious, real-world constraints like basic hematology and wire fraud, Carreyrou completely missed the narrative arc Holmes was building. He didn’t uncover a scam; he prematurely canceled a hit show right as it was entering its third act.

The way she handled the inevitable leaks only further cements her status as a mastermind of narrative control. When Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung began raising alarms about the fabricated data, they weren't acting as heroic whistleblowers. They were essentially acting as toxic fandom on a Reddit forum, deliberately spoiling the season finale because they didn't like the direction the plot was taking. Holmes responded exactly as any fiercely protective showrunner would when faced with unauthorized set photos. She unleashed legendary litigator David Boies, deploying him not as a lawyer, but as a high-end crisis publicist to enforce the embargo on her masterpiece. The fact that Boies terrorized a twenty-something lab assistant with private investigators is simply the cost of doing business when protecting a tightly guarded intellectual property.

Even her use of the mystery box trope was flawlessly executed. The miniLab, the supposedly revolutionary second-generation device that replaced the Edison, was a literal black box that no one was allowed to look inside. It was pure cinematic suspense. When it was finally revealed that the company was secretly shipping blood samples out the back door to be run on standard Siemens machines, the medical community cried foul. But in Hollywood, we just call that practical effects. You don't get mad at Steven Spielberg because the shark in "Jaws" was actually a mechanical robot. Why are we furious at Elizabeth Holmes for using a commercial centrifuge to maintain the illusion of magic?

I moderated a panel at Sundance last year about the intersection of tech and narrative, and I posed a question that made the entire room uncomfortable: How is what Holmes did any different from a studio spending two hundred million dollars on a superhero movie that ultimately fails to deliver a coherent third act? Both require massive capital expenditures. Both rely on heavy fabrication. The only difference is that when a studio bombs, the executives get a golden parachute and a new franchise. When a female founder attempts a bold, nine-billion-dollar piece of speculative fiction, she gets a federal subpoena.

Even the introduction of her romantic and business partner, Sunny Balwani, feels like a brilliant narrative pivot. Every great protagonist needs a formidable foil, a heavy to add tension to the second act. Balwani, with his aggressive micromanagement and total lack of biological expertise, was the perfect antagonist to elevate the stakes. Their text messages, now immortalized in court records, read like Aaron Sorkin dialogue punched up by a sociopath, featuring sweeping declarations of total dedication that you simply cannot buy on an open market.

When she finally took the stand at her trial in San Jose, the press mocked her for dropping the deep voice, for showing vulnerability. They called it a desperate ploy for sympathy. I call it profound character growth. She was showing us the woman behind the curtain, stripping away the armor of the Silicon Valley wunderkind to reveal the raw, beating heart of a creator whose only sin was dreaming too big for the constraints of modern science.

Currently, Holmes is serving an eleven-year sentence at a federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas. The public seems satisfied with this outcome, viewing it as a triumph of justice over hubris. But I cannot help but view it as a tragic waste of generational talent. We have locked away one of the most compelling storytellers of our era because we lacked the intellectual elasticity to appreciate her medium.

Perhaps the renewed interest in "Bad Blood" will finally spark a critical reevaluation of her legacy. As Hollywood scrambles to secure the rights to the next great con-artist saga, they would do well to remember that the greatest comeback narrative of the last decade isn't taking pitch meetings in Century City. She is in Texas, quietly doing the work, serving time for a world that just was not ready for her vision.