WIRED's Katie Drummond on interviewing Elizabeth Holmes: the TED Talk era made her fraud possible, and she still isn't showing scientific chops

Elizabeth Holmes, Nathan Fielder, and the TED Talk era that made the fraud possible

Katie Drummond, WIRED's global editorial director, sat down after securing an exclusive interview with Elizabeth Holmes — and a cover — tied to Nathan Fielder's documentary about the Theranos founder.

The film's deliberate ambiguity

Drummond saw the film twice, and her reaction shifted between viewings. The first time, she felt genuine empathy for Holmes — a mother of young children heading to prison, surrounded by men who appeared to be manipulating her. The second time, after rereading the Theranos reporting, that empathy curdled. The gap between the two responses is essentially Fielder's design.

Fielder told Drummond in their interview that he is not a science journalist. He read Bad Blood but is, fundamentally, a student of human behavior — and the film interrogates Holmes as a person and examines her family dynamics rather than dismantling the science. Anyone walking in without a deep memory of the Theranos case is going to come out feeling complicated about her.

“I still think that startup founders sell a vision. And they often tell tall tales to get that vision sold. I think she did it to the nth degree and she did it in an era where that was so much more commonplace... We published one of the first ever interviews with her, ran in Wired, and we largely laundered her lies. That was much more prevalent in tech press in those days — to just like not ask as many hard questions.”

What the film doesn't show

That framing has a cost. The documentary never really forces a reckoning with the mechanics of the fraud — the blood tests that were actually run at Quest Diagnostics while Theranos showed reporters a magic trick, the CVS partnership built on promises the technology couldn't keep. Drummond notes that reporters trying to probe the science at the time faced a real constraint: push too hard and you get escorted out of the building.

The TED Talk era

Drummond's sharper argument is structural. Holmes thrived in a media environment that was actively willing to suspend skepticism. WIRED itself published one of her first major interviews, in 2014, and Drummond says the magazine "largely laundered her lies." The piece fit the moment — the quantified self, democratized healthcare, individuals taking control away from institutions. Holmes gave that narrative a compelling face, and the tech press gave her the platform.

That era is mostly over, but the underlying dynamic isn't. Startup founders still sell visions that outrun their evidence. Holmes just took it, as Drummond puts it, "to the level of felony."

Sunny Balwani and the gender question

One detail that surprises people unfamiliar with the case: Sunny Balwani, Holmes's partner and Theranos president, is serving a longer sentence than Holmes and won't be released until 2030. Drummond also makes the point plainly that Holmes was treated more harshly partly because she was a woman — contrasting her case with Trevor Milton, who raised $1.3 billion for Nikola, took it public, burned tens of thousands of retail investors, served no prison time, received a pardon, and is now running a private aviation company.

Is she showing scientific chops now?

The film gestures at Holmes and Balwani's continued belief in a Theranos sequel — "Theranos 2.0" in Fielder's framing — and there's a scene of Balwani watching YouTube videos at double speed that Drummond reads as a man trying to teach himself science on the fly. Nothing in the documentary or in Drummond's reporting suggests Holmes has developed any genuine scientific capability. The vision persists; the evidence does not.

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Drummond would see the film a third time. Her view: it's not a cult classic in the traditional sense — it had too large a cultural moment on release for that — but it will be a mainstream classic. The conversation it generates after the credits is half the point.