Inside The Story Behind That Forbes Photo At The Center Of The Elizabeth Holmes Documentary

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1:01Hi, everybody.

1:02Alex Knapp: I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me once again is my colleague, Forbes senior editor, Alex Knapp. Alex, thanks so much for coming on. Always great to be here, Brittany. I'm really interested in today's discussion because Forbes is certainly a big part of the story we're talking about. Yes, what we're going to discuss is the new documentary featuring Elizabeth Holmes called You Can See Everything. The cataclysmic rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes is one of the most well-documented stories to come out of Silicon Valley. She was a biotech hotshot after she dropped out of Stanford in 2003 to focus on her company, Theranos, a company she founded that promised to revolutionize blood testing.

1:44Alex Knapp: In its heyday, it was valued at$9 billion and touted high-profile investors like Rupert Murdoch and Henry Kissinger. And in Elizabeth Holmes' heyday, she was valued at$4.5 million. That's how much Forbes said her net worth was, and she was on the cover of Forbes in 2014. But by 2016, Forbes revised her net worth to zero. And a few years later, she was ultimately convicted of defrauding investors out of millions. She was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. That cover, that iconic Forbes cover, we will show it here right now. It's one of the most infamous photos of Holmes. She's the subject, like I said, of that new Nathan Fielder documentary, You Can See Everything, where that photo comes up a lot and she talks about her feelings surrounding that image.

2:31Alex Knapp: You wrote about the picture. So to start off the conversation, can you explain the history behind the iconic image? Absolutely. So she was photographed for the cover and I will say actually, and I have the issue here with me, she's actually one of five different covers that we had on this issue. And you can see she's even number three, three out of five. And this was for the Forge 400 in 2014. And she at the time was the youngest self-made female billionaire. And that's one of the reasons why she was selected to feature on the cover. I do think it's interesting. I saw some folks on Twitter talk about how they bought that issue back in the day to read the article about her.

3:16There is, in fact, no article about her in the issue, which I think is kind of interesting, too. It's just a little blurb like we have for a lot of our billionaires, just a little bit about how she earned her wealth and some of her vital statistics like her age, etc. But, yeah, that photo has gone on to live in infamy and TikTok and Instagram parodies and Halloween costumes. I've seen a lot of those last week. I've seen them as well. And it is when you think of Elizabeth Holmes and whenever she comes up in whatever content is featuring her, you almost always see that image. And Forbes says it's the most wanted image in our collection.

4:00I mean, just how popular is this? Well, to give you an example, our second most popular image is a shot we did of Sam Bankman Freed, another infamous Forbes cover subject. and her image has been licensed 750 % more than Sam Bankman's and he's number two so it's just clearly a very popular image to license, a very popular image to use when Hulu did their TV series in 2022, the poster of it is a recreation of that image with actress Amanda Seyfried who's also in the documentary and so yeah it's definitely lived on. And it's brought up in the documentary quite a bit and there are spoilers ahead in my next question so if you haven't seen it yet join back into this conversation once you have.

4:55So Elizabeth Holmes when she was in this shot for Forbes back in 2014

5:00Alex Knapp: she's wearing the Steve Jobs black turtleneck she has those piercing blue eyes her hair is up and she's holding that, looking directly at the camera. We see a completely different Elizabeth Holmes in this documentary. She's lost that deeper voice. She appears more meek and she talks about this image. She's not a fan of the image. She talks about it before she goes to prison with her partner, Billy Evans. She's upset by it. Then it even comes up two years later. Talk to us about how this was, as you call, a subplot of the movie. When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals.

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6:17There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer. It's interesting because, like you said, it does come up frequently in the movie. You also see these billboards proclaiming her innocence, and those billboards use that image, which I might add, the person behind those images did not in fact license the image and was the subject of a copyright infringement suit for it that settled out of court. And she claims to not like the image in the movie, which is interesting considering the history, because, you know, when she came in that day, I talked with Ethan Pines, who did the photography for this photo.

7:13And he said, you know, that was her wardrobe. You know, she came in in that black turtleneck. We did not discuss wardrobe with her ahead of time. She did her own hair and makeup. And Ethan told me he wanted her to be holding something that was kind of emblematic of the technology and kind of emblematic of kind of he described her as having kind of a sci-fi look. But it was Theranos' idea to have the vial of fake blood. Their team brought that in. And one of the first people to license that Elizabeth Holmes image from Forge was Theranos. And they used it in their PR for the company. What do you think, looking at this image and what we know now, what do you think that image says to you that she's holding that little vial?

8:01Because as we know, Theranos was touted as a company where you just get a pinprick of blood and it could run hundreds of tests. Obviously, that is not the case because she's currently sitting in jail for fraud. So what do you think this image says now? I think it's emblematic of, you know, the hype around technology. You know, she, I think, carefully crafted and she talked about she's talked about the other reporters crafting kind of a business persona. I do think the, you know, her trying to evoke Steve Jobs was very deliberate. And any, you know, person who's been convicted of fraud is obviously selling an image.

8:47and this was clearly trying to sell an image, selling an image of the future, selling an image of this is a person who is going to be changing the way medicine happens, the way people get diagnosed for disease, which of course was wrong and not true. And I always thought it was telling that there was nobody who, if you looked at the board of Theranos, nobody on that board had any healthcare experience whatsoever. I think that, you know, big tell right there about what audience she was trying to attract with her company. No matter where you fall on the spectrum of following Elizabeth Holmes's story, just seeing the documentary because of all the hype surrounding it, people had a lot of different takeaways from Elizabeth Holmes.

9:34Right. Some people said, hey, that's someone who was convicted of fraud and she's manipulating us again. Other people say, you know, she might be bad, but her partner, Billy Evans, he certainly appears to be the bigger villain in this documentary. Some people feel bad for her because she's in jail. She has two young children. Some people don't at all. I mean, where do you think, what do you make of what people are thinking about Elizabeth Holmes now?

10:00Alex Knapp: And the fact that she's saying this one thing in the documentary about that shoot and about that photo. You talk to the photographer. He is saying a different story here. Right. Well, I think it's interesting. What's interesting about the film, and I'd encourage you to see it, it is a documentary that also, I think in many ways, interrogates the form of the documentary. You know, documentaries have become so much more popular in recent years with this kind of explosion of true crime. And, you know, I think Netflix puts out a documentary. It feels like they put a new one out every day. I see a promo.

10:39And I think what Nathan Fielder does in this film is very interesting in that I think whatever interpretation you may have had of Elizabeth Holmes going in, you'll probably come out feeling justified in that interpretation of Elizabeth Holmes. If you think she's a victim of more powerful men, her partner Atharanos, who was her boyfriend for 12 years, or her partner Billy Evans now, there's plenty of that documentary to kind of support that interpretation of Elizabeth Holmes. If you go in thinking of her as someone who committed fraud and who manipulated people to commit fraud, I think you will come out of that documentary feeling very justified in that opinion.

11:24I think Nathan Fielder definitely has his own point of view on this. I also think that it was very subtle in the way, in his opinion. I think he came down on that latter fraud side personally. But that might be what I took into the movie. That's what's interesting about the movie. And if you haven't seen it, you definitely should. But I do think what the documentary is getting at and what the story of Elizabeth Holmes gets at is, you know, kind of the nature of truth. And we live in an era of kind of social media and of hype and of all of these different things. And I think that Elizabeth Holmes kind of coming in at that early age of social media hype and Silicon Valley hype was very deft at, you know, putting out her own image.

12:22And I think right now, you know, she and her partner, Billy Evans, have a new company purporting to do many of the same things that Darren has tried to do. And they've managed to attract$15 million of investment so far. And it's possible this documentary might get them more money. It's possible it may turn off investors. It'll be interesting to see what happens there. I was really interested in learning your perspective here because you are a health care reporter. you were at Forbes during this Elizabeth Holmes boom, right? You were at Forbes when she was shot, when this iconic image was shot.

13:01And when you see her, like I said, crazy trajectory, her rise and her even bigger downfall, what do you think is missing from the national dialogue right now about Elizabeth Holmes and about Thernos? I think the thing, honestly, that is missing the most is, uh, you know, people talk about her, she a victim issue, manipulators, she, this issue that, um, what I think about are the patients who got false test diagnoses from her, who, uh, maybe whose healthcare trajectory was changed because they use her technology, got false information and how that impacted their health, their lives, their families.

13:47And honestly, if there's one narrative I feel like has gotten lost in this, it's really those people. I've even seen on social media joking that the only people who were hurt were the rich people who invested in her, but that is far from the truth. They did millions of tests on patients in Arizona, and those people got bad information. Then their health may have suffered as a consequence, And I think that honestly has gotten lost more than anything else. This is the first time I've heard that being talked about in a serious way, especially about this documentary.

14:23Alex Knapp: But I do want to leave our conversation on a note from our director of photography at Forbes because she wrote about this image, too. And I want to get your take on it. She asked this question. Is one of Forbes' most famous portraits deceiving us or just telling us what we want to hear, examining the extraordinary afterlife of an iconic image? And then she goes on to say this. Photography has the extraordinary ability to capture a moment, preserve it, and return it to us, even as time and circumstance change its meaning. But what makes the Holmes portrait so compelling is that it offers no answers.

14:55Alex Knapp: The longer we look, the less certain we become about what those eyes reveal, which brings us back to Fielder's film and its deceptively simple title. title you can see everything but seeing everything isn't the same as knowing everything what do you make of the afterlife of this image and the trajectory of how people have looked at it from 2014 from when Holmes went to prison and to now when she's saying hey I don't like that photo when uh the photographer for Forbes is saying no you know that's not what you were saying back in 2014? I don't know that I can improve on Robin's prose there. I do think, you know, like the movie, like Elizabeth Holmes herself, I think that the nature of hype and technology when people are talking about, you know, things that a lay person just simply can't gather enough expertise to understand a lot of what we what what you do in the business world as an investor as a consumer a lot of it is based around trust and i think what the elizabeth holmes image and her story shows is how easily that trust can be manipulated and why it's so important to have you know journalists analysts, analysts at investment banks, regulators, all trying to ensure that the things that were being sold about technology are in fact the truth.

16:29And I'm especially thinking about that, looking at the stock market in AI right now. Alex, I always appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much for joining me. And until next time. Great. Thank you, Brittany.

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