What is the reason for the enduring public fascination with Elizabeth Holmes?

The Lighthouse cinema in Dublin has already sold out multiple screenings of You Can See Everything, a full month before the film’s Irish release. UK cinemas are reporting “bonkers” demand for the movie, which debuted in the US last week to sold-out theatres, grossing the highest opening weekend for a documentary in 22 years. Reviews for the film have been glowing, but it is still unusual for any documentary to achieve this kind of reception, especially one that is three hours long. The world, it seems, just cannot get enough of Elizabeth Holmes, the film’s subject. But why has her story proven so compelling?

If you do not know Holmes’s story, it is not for a lack of popular cultural artefacts telling it. John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood propelled the scandal to global attention in 2018, spending 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Then there was also a star-studded TV series spawned by an equally popular podcast, both called The Dropout, and a HBO documentary too.

Each of these tells the story of how Holmes dropped out of college to build a Silicon Valley empire backed by the likes of Henry Kissinger and George Shultz. Her company marketed and deployed a blood testing invention that, it turned out, wasn’t doing what she said it would. Once a darling of 2010s tech optimism, gracing magazine covers and with a paper net worth of $4.5 billion, Holmes is now an inmate at a minimum security women’s prison in Bryan, Texas, having been given an 11-year sentence for multiple counts of fraud for deceiving investors (the sentence was subsequently reduced).

So what is it about her that people find so compelling? It could simply be the morbid fascination we experience watching someone fall from such a high pedestal. Or perhaps there is something satisfying in seeing a chancer face their comeuppance. It can often feel as if justice, whether of the criminal or poetic variety, has limited reach in Silicon Valley. Holmes is from the same generation – is the same age, in fact – as that other college dropout, Mark Zuckerberg, who has managed to come through a decade of scandals and congressional hearings, only to end up even richer, more powerful and owning more castles than ever.

Holmes’s pedestal was higher than the rest of her generation. Her promise was loftier, that a single drop of blood was enough to diagnose disease. Her personal branding was not the hoodie and the MacBook of the tech bro with an idea; it was the ascetic minimalism and turtleneck of the genius with a vision. She was Steve Jobs, but young. And photogenic.

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And her particular pedestal was gendered. She was the bossiest girlboss of the girlboss era, which was, in retrospect, higher in expectations for women than it was in actual opportunities.

I worked around a lot of start-ups in that period, and the people who got ahead were not usually the ones with the best ideas, but rather the ones who had the kind of unwavering self-belief that could convince investors they were worthwhile recipients of funding. They were the ones who could treat being told that they were wrong or misguided as proof that they were on the right track, that they were “disrupting” something that was clinging to old ways.

They were the ones with the laptop stickers emblazoned with “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do”. And for whatever reason, they were mostly men (they still are; even today 84 per cent of venture capital money goes to all-male teams).

Elizabeth Holmes seems to have had a kind of blind, almost preternatural self-confidence. Bad Blood is full of tales from people who knew her and who recall her imperviousness to facts or advice that would contradict her vision.

Perhaps this kind of extreme self-belief is what let her emerge unscathed from the gauntlet of criticism, belittling and doubt that would have made a more self-aware person falter, and whose blades seem sharper for women.

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This blind self-belief is also, probably, what led to her downfall. It is one thing to ignore the doubters, but quite another to ignore the experts who tell you that your idea is a scientific impossibility, or that wire fraud is illegal.

Here, I believe, also lies the thing that makes her – or at least her persona – so compelling. Even after everything was revealed, she maintained that same posture of defiance, telling The New York Times in 2023 that she was still working on healthcare inventions, and naming her baby, born during the legal proceedings, Invicta, meaning invincible.

Even this Shakespearean tragic flaw and the resulting downfall appear to have led to no epiphany. Instead the trailer for the new film depicts her, just weeks before reporting to prison, smiling serenely as if suspended in amber, impervious to our judgment, to facts, to reality, but still imploring us to trust her.

Nevertheless, as we would have said at her peak, she persisted.