The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley (2019)

I watched The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley as a warm-up for the Nathan Fielder and Oppenheim documentary on Elizabeth Holmes. Alex Gibney’s 2019 HBO film covers Theranos’s full arc, from a 19-year-old Stanford dropout pitching a device that could run hundreds of tests off a few drops of blood to a company valued at roughly $9 billion that couldn’t deliver on the central promise it was built on. I enjoyed it, and I want to be clear about the kind of enjoyment I mean. It isn’t a comfort watch or a movie you put on to feel good. It’s the satisfaction of watching a story you half know get laid out in an order that makes sense of it.

I also came to this with a bit of a personal stake. I lived in Silicon Valley during the peak of all this, so the world the documentary describes was the water I was swimming in at the time. Theranos wasn’t an abstract scandal to me. It was part of the general atmosphere of that era, when a young founder with a big vision and the right investors could get treated as a visionary before producing much of anything, and watching it now felt like getting a look behind a curtain I’d been standing in front of. I’d recommend it to anyone, but I think it lands a little differently if you remember what the mood was like while it was happening.

The best part of the film, for me, is the way it divides the people in Holmes’s orbit. On one side are the ones who saw through her, or at least felt that something was off. Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung, both young employees who noticed problems in the lab and paid for speaking up, carry a lot of the film’s emotional weight, and Shultz’s situation is especially uncomfortable because his grandfather, George Shultz, sat on the Theranos board and sided with the company. Watching a family split over whether to believe the person in the black turtleneck or the grandson with the data is the most human thing in the documentary. On the other side are the people who stayed fully invested despite every red flag, and the board is the clearest example. A roster that included Henry Kissinger and James Mattis looks less like oversight and more like a collection of famous names who lent Holmes credibility she hadn’t earned yet, and the film is good at showing how that borrowed credibility fed on itself. Each impressive name made the next investor or partner, like Walgreens, feel safer about not looking too closely.

That contrast is where the psychology gets interesting, and Gibney lets it play out without hammering the point. Authority bias is everywhere, since nobody wanted to be the person questioning a board full of statesmen. Sunk cost shows up in the people who had put in years or money and couldn’t bring themselves to admit the foundation was rotten. Then there’s the culture of secrecy inside the company, where employees were kept in separate silos and told that doubt was disloyalty, which is a textbook way to keep people from comparing notes. Nothing in the film requires you to believe everyone involved was stupid. It’s more unsettling than that, because it shows how reasonable people can talk themselves into looking away when the story is exciting, and the person telling it is convincing.

Holmes herself is the piece I’m most curious to revisit after the next documentary. Gibney uses a lot of footage of her, from polished interviews to strange, awkward moments that feel like glimpses of the machinery behind the persona, and the effect is that you keep trying to work out how much of her was performance and how much was belief. The film doesn’t hand you a tidy answer, and I don’t think it should. It does show someone who understood, better than almost anyone around her, that people invest in confidence long before they invest in results. The pacing keeps the story moving even when it gets into the weeds of blood-testing technology and legal threats, and the investigation that eventually unraveled Theranos gives the second half real momentum.

Which brings me to why I’m so excited about what’s next. Nathan Fielder has built a career on manipulating the people around him, and manipulation has been Holmes’s method the entire time, so putting the two of them in a room feels like it could turn into a masterclass in who can outmaneuver whom. The Inventor gives you the factual backbone and the cast of characters, so going in with this film fresh in my head should make whatever Fielder does with Holmes easier to appreciate, and probably a lot funnier and more uncomfortable at the same time.

I’d recommend The Inventor to true crime fans, anyone who likes a good corporate scandal, and people who got hooked on the Theranos story through the book or the podcast and want to see the faces attached to it. It’s also the obvious pick if you plan to watch the Fielder documentary and want to be caught up first. If you have any interest in how a lie that big gets believed by that many smart people, it’s worth your evening.