Fielder originally did not intend to appear on-screen, but Holmes irresistibly drew him into her web, and the resulting game of cat-and-mouse between the two magicians is astonishing.<\/p>\n
[\u00a0What is the reason for the enduring public fascination with Elizabeth Holmes?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n The deadpan Fielder is a Canadian-born satirist who worked with Sacha Baron Cohen on the 2018 mockumentary Who Is America? and on his own shows, Nathan for You on Comedy Central and The Rehearsal on HBO, where he has built elaborate ruses. He is a master at spinning his own absurd reality, and so is Holmes.<\/p>\n The sparring of these two raises the question: Is there any point in searching for the truth, or is it better to settle into our own fractured, subjective realities?<\/p>\n At 30, Holmes became the first self-made female billionaire after she dropped out of Stanford at 20 and started Theranos. But she\u2019s no role model for women. When she got in trouble, she embraced victimhood, turning from a confident Silicon Valley founder who dominated every room into a damsel in distress. In court, she blamed her lover\/partner, Sunny Balwani, who got an almost 13-year sentence for helping Holmes defraud investors of more than $700 million. She said he abused her psychologically and sexually and controlled everything from her clothes to her diet. The jury was unconvinced.<\/p>\n Holmes tries to turn Fielder into a film-noir sap, someone who will believe her lies about her lies, be emotionally drawn to her and come to her rescue. And the documentary projects, then calls into question, a scenario where her current lover\/partner, Billy Evans, is manipulating her, asking for a cut of the documentary\u2019s profits supposedly behind her back, taking over her X account and putting up foul-mouthed posts pretending to be her, releasing a hologram of Holmes that he nonchalantly acknowledges might be used by some men online for porn.<\/p>\n The woman famous for her guile \u2013 suckering George Shultz, Jim Mattis, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch and other brainy older men \u2013 plays guileless, acting as if she can\u2019t even scramble eggs without her controlling fiance\u2019s help, or understand the simplistic joke in the classic Abbott and Costello Who\u2019s on first? comedy routine. Fielder jokes that if Holmes had \u201cjust said that Theranos was a comedy bit, maybe you could get off scot-free\u201d. The couple talk about building \u201cmonuments of love\u201d to each other, but it\u2019s more like monuments of manipulation.<\/p>\n Shultz\u2019s grandson, Tyler Shultz, who was an intern and researcher at Theranos and then left and blew the whistle on Holmes, said on CBS Mornings that Holmes took in Fielder enough to allow doubt to creep in about her guilt.<\/p>\n \u201cShe knows that she was lying,\u201d Shultz said, \u201cbecause she created this whole web of lies that you would not have needed to create if you actually believed the lies.\u201d<\/p>\n [\u00a0Spoiler alert: Slow Horses, Strictly Come Dancing and an Irish actor\u2019s strange beach limboOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Shultz said that the harm to patients was horrible and that Fielder never laid out the dimensions of her crimes.<\/p>\n \u201cWe told people that they had HIV when they did not,\u201d he said. \u201cWe told people that they had cancer when they did not. We told expecting mothers that they had lost their unborn child when they had not.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Elizabeth](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/MEJRVALX4RO7JWHTH5QPR57WRQ.jpg\")
Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans. Photograph: Philip Cheung\/The New York Times<\/p>\n