“I’m glad that a documentary is receiving such enormous interest,” Gibney told Variety. “I’m a little bit surprised at the enormity of the interest because I was interested in Elizabeth Holmes, yes, because she was a confidence person—a liar—but also this was a person, at the time, who was using the structures of power to line her pockets.” Gibney went on to say that, sans the power and influence that compelled him to tell her story, the Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything isn’t nearly as enthralling as the powerful, empire-building fraudster she once was. “[She’s] somebody who has zero power,” he pointed out.
Indeed, Holmes’ life has changed considerably since The Inventor. Convicted of fraud in 2022, she is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence and has been ordered to jointly pay $452 million in restitution with former Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. You Can See Everything follows Holmes and her family in the final days before she went to prison, a more intimate, psychologically messier portrait than Gibney’s more formally astute documentary. It’s here, where Holmes is presented as a disgraced figure navigating a life with extreme limits on her influence, that Gibney struggles to find her captivating. “It’s still interesting to see that she’s trying to create a character for herself that’s sympathetic,” he said, “but the part that was interesting to me was not only her as a person playing a fictional character and creating a fictional company to enrich herself, but doing so with enormously powerful corporate lawyers, with people like [former U.S. Secretaries Of State] George Schultz and Henry Kissinger who were backing her up, so it was part of a larger structure that was extremely problematic.”
Gibney had no comment on his next Hulu documentary about Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024. But given his views on You Can See Everything, one has to wonder whether Gibney will be more interested in the lofty power structures surrounding Mangione’s alleged crime than in the messy personal circumstances that may have motivated him. You know: Just the facts.
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