You can see everything, can you?
Amy Chozick’s New York Times op-ed on the Elizabeth Holmes documentary shows how reporters, filmmakers and audiences see what they want to see.
In a recent op-ed, former New York Times reporter Amy Chozick describes watching You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. Her 2023 Times profile of Holmes figures in the film, so she is both its critic and part of its story.
Chozick spent several days inside Holmes’s rented home for that profile, weeks before Holmes went to prison. It was widely attacked as a puff piece, and she acknowledges being trolled for going too easy on her subject. The profile itself recorded her editor’s verdict: “Amy Chozick, you got rolled!”
Now Chozick writes of Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, “They are salespeople. Their humanity is what they now had to sell.” She says access was their route to “a type of exoneration,” that she felt herself getting “swept up,” and that she left thinking she had better check her wallet. If she saw all that in 2023, how much of it reached her New York Times readers?
Chozick, in turn, takes aim at the film. She asks, “Where is the nanny?” She had met one at the house, and says that without her the couple come off as harried parents.
Chozick’s profile quoted Holmes saying that actors were playing “a character I created.” In the film, the couple insist the word must have been “they.” One pronoun separates a confession from a complaint.
Chozick also disputes how the film closes this matter. As she describes it, the postscript says Fielder got in touch with her and that she stood by her story without providing evidence. She says she never discussed the quote with him and referred his inquiry to the Times, which has stood by the reporting. By her own account, though, she had ghosted him and never answered his question.
These are fair points. But they come from Chozick, who had much the same access, felt the same pull, and was criticized for the same softness some now see in the film.
Is this a case of he said, she said? It is not quite even. The reporter wrote the words down at the time, though her notebook is gone, and the couple who say they record everything have not produced that conversation. “He said, she said” is often what we say when we would rather not weigh the evidence.
That habit reaches well beyond reporters and filmmakers. We have more information than any people in history. Yet we mostly see what we want to see, and we excuse ourselves from digging further by saying that no one can ever know the whole picture. We call this keeping an open mind.
Thirty-four days before she reported to federal prison in 2023, Elizabeth Holmes opened her home to documentarians Fielder and Oppenheim. Early in their documentary she tells them, in a teasing way, “You can see everything.” It sounds like a remarkable offer. I think she knew it was a safe one.
Cameras can follow a person into the kitchen and even the bathroom. They cannot follow her into her own mind.
Fraud has been a constant point of interest and concern throughout my career as an accountant and finance professional. I worked in senior positions in government and on Wall Street. I worked at and with institutions which claimed full transparency and checks and balances. And yet, fraud and malfeasance occurred repeatedly. So I went to this film for the fraud angle and stayed for something else: the way nearly everyone in it, and many of us watching, treat the truth as something that can never quite be reached.
In my experience, people who cross the line do not think of themselves as crooks. They find a rationalization, and over time they come to believe it. Educated people are especially good at this. I dealt with a few senior officials at Enron before it collapsed, and met its former chief executive, Jeffrey Skilling, at a meeting. He went to prison and maintained his innocence to the end.
Holmes insists she has never told a lie. A jury convicted her of defrauding investors, yet to me her certainty looks real, and that is what makes her so unsettling to watch. When she explains what she meant by saying her machine “can” perform any test, she evokes Bill Clinton and what the meaning of the word “is” is.
The filmmakers do not stand outside this problem. By the film’s own account, Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, demanded a share of the profits while she was out of the room, and the studio, A24, agreed over the directors’ objections. Evans later gave up the deal, but that is incidental. The studio had been willing to cross the line.
The filmmakers did not tell Holmes about the deal while they filmed her, and they leave us wondering whether she stepped out on purpose. Exactly what happened is unclear. The film seems content to let this important detail remain fuzzy.
The most revealing moment comes when Fielder and Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in The Dropout, stage his prison visit with her. Seyfried notes that a line showing Holmes knew of Evans’s request for a share of the profits makes her look calculating, and Fielder changes it to leave that unclear. She then calls him out: he changed it, she says, because he disliked how it felt, not because the new version was truer. The man who could see everything shades what the viewers can see.
The film also hints that Fielder developed feelings for Holmes, and he neither confirms nor denies it. In a conventional documentary, even the suspicion would draw serious objections. Here it is one more titillating turn.
The wider coverage in the media has largely followed the film’s lead. Some critics, notably at Reason, objected to the deal with Evans. But reviews were overwhelmingly glowing, and the livelier debate was whether Fielder’s apparent feelings were real or a trick. Truth had become a puzzle to enjoy rather than a question to answer.
None of this is confined to one strange film. We’ve been through this movie before. Prior to the financial crisis, the warnings were clear. “We rate every deal,” went one internal S&P email exchange. “It could be structured by cows, and we would rate it.” Afterward, S&P paid about $1.4 billion to settle without admitting it broke the law, and few people on Wall Street accepted responsibility for the losses.
Someone usually sees. Tyler Shultz saw what was happening at Theranos and became a whistleblower. The rest of us tend to have reasons not to look, or find it easier to assume that nobody can really know. It is true that we cannot read Elizabeth Holmes’s mind. But we do not need to read her mind to judge what her machine could and could not do.
The pattern continues. Evans’s new blood-testing startup has reportedly raised as much as $20 million, with no commercial product so far. The company rejects any comparison to Theranos and says its approach is fundamentally different. Its investors may be right, but I wonder what they think they saw.
Then there is crypto. Last week, hackers the FBI links to North Korea stole about $6.3 billion from Binance within minutes, and the FBI gave the industry the addresses involved. On a public blockchain, you can quite literally see everything, and that did not stop the theft. Large institutions now treat crypto as an investment and the government is legitimizing it, yet most people could not explain how it works. The blind are leading the blind.
A certain fuzziness has settled into how we see the world, individually and collectively. Much of it we make ourselves, through rationalization, self-interest and the comfortable phrase “Who can really know?” Fog should be a reason to slow down. Instead, we have made it our permission to carry on. We can always blame the fog.
— John Laxmi
November 2, 2026
