A Theranos whistleblower is pushing back on Nathan Fielder’s new Elizabeth Holmes movie, saying it turns one of the most notorious fraud cases in recent memory into something that feels precise while leaving the central deception cloudy. In a sharply personal essay, Shultz calls the three-hour film “a hilarious, thrilling, fascinating, beautiful piece of art,” but says it is not a documentary and should not be treated like one.
The reason the film is drawing attention now is simple: it arrives just as Holmes is portrayed in the stretch before she heads to prison for fraud, and the movie asks viewers to sit with the question of whether she lied. Shultz says he knows that question from the inside. He says he met Holmes when he was 20 and was 32 when she went to prison, a span that covers the whole arc of his adult life. He also says his grandfather sat on her board and that Holmes came to his family holidays and birthday parties, which makes his criticism feel less like distant commentary than a personal correction.
That correction is specific. Shultz says the film does not go far beyond the walls of the small condo Holmes and Billy were renting in San Diego, and that it digs up the Theranos blood-testing device, breaks it into pieces, lays them out on the kitchen table and shows them to Fielder. But he says the machine on that table was not the one he worked with 12 hours a day, not the one they hid from regulators, not the one that kept failing quality controls and not the one used to knowingly give patients inaccurate medical results. In other words, the movie gives viewers a device, but not the device that mattered.
That is where the essay lands its hardest blow. Shultz says Holmes showed Fielder a future version of the product that was never completed and never used, which lets the film ask whether she lied while still narrowing the frame enough to miss the answer he says matters. His complaint is not that the movie ignores the scandal. It is that by focusing so tightly on what can be seen, it risks making the truth feel harder to pin down than it was. At the center of it all is the same warning he gives in the essay: do not underestimate Elizabeth Holmes.
Shultz even reduces the problem to a phrase that sounds almost like a joke and lands like a charge: “Who’s on first?” The point is that the film may be playful, but the scandal was not. For readers trying to understand the Elizabeth Holmes movie, the unresolved issue is not whether it is entertaining. It is whether a work built around ambiguity can tell a story this serious without sanding down the facts that made it a fraud in the first place.
