Elizabeth

Elizabeth Holmes is the convicted fraudster at the center of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s hit documentary “You Can See Everything,” but for many viewers, it’s her longtime partner, Billy Evans, who has emerged as the film’s marquee villain.

Evans, 34, comes from a wealthy San Diego hotel family and stood by Holmes as her blood-testing startup Theranos collapsed and she was convicted in 2022 of defrauding investors. The couple has two children, 5-year-old son William and 3-year-old daughter Invicta. With Holmes serving an 11-year federal prison sentence in Texas, Evans is raising their children while pursuing a new biotech venture of his own.

In the film — warning: spoilers ahead — Evans comes across as controlling and increasingly volatile, taking over from Holmes as she whisks eggs, interrupting an interview to demand that the cameras be turned off and at one point casually brushing his teeth while standing stark naked in the shower, with Fielder awkwardly looking on. He speaks of Holmes dedicating her life to building “monuments of love” to him, and in one heated confrontation threatens to ruin the lives of people he believes have wronged her. “I’ve got vengeance in my heart,” he declares.

So who is Evans, how did he end up with one of Silicon Valley’s most infamous figures and what is he up to now?

What do we know about Evans’ upbringing?

Evans grew up in a wealthy, prominent San Diego family. His grandparents, William and Anne Evans, founded Evans Hotels in 1953, opening what became the Bahia Resort Hotel on Mission Bay. The family business later expanded to include the Catamaran Resort Hotel and Spa and the Lodge at Torrey Pines in La Jolla.

Evans attended Francis Parker School, an exclusive private school in San Diego, before graduating from MIT with a degree in economics in 2015. Despite his family’s wealth, Evans is neither an employee nor a shareholder of Evans Hotels, according to a statement the company issued Oct. 1.

His family reportedly had reservations about his relationship with Holmes at first. But his father, also named William, became a supporter — and even went undercover of sorts at her 2021 fraud trial. According to NPR, the elder Evans showed up for jury selection under the name “Hanson,” introducing himself to reporters as a concerned citizen who fixed up old cars for a living. His expensive loafers and a Starbucks cup bearing a different name eventually raised suspicions.

How did Evans meet Holmes?

The two met Oct. 7, 2017, at a Fleet Week party hosted by a venture capitalist in San Francisco, according to Evans. Theranos was already engulfed in scandal, though Holmes had yet to be criminally charged.

In the documentary, Evans recalls that he initially didn’t recognize Holmes because she was wearing a floppy hat, dark sunglasses and a Band-Aid on her face from a scratch by her husky. He says he fell in love with her almost immediately. When Fielder points out that he could barely see her face, Evans replies, “I guess that wasn’t what mattered to me.”

Nathan Fielder observes Elizabeth Holmes with her family in “You Can See Everything.”

(A24)

Holmes says the attraction was mutual. The two became friends and started dating about six months later, just weeks before she was indicted on federal fraud charges.

Fielder asks Evans whether he worried early on that Holmes might be conning him. “100%,” Evans replies, before asking what she would have had to gain from him. “Well, isn’t your family rich?” Fielder asks.

Pressed about the family’s money, Evans grows visibly uncomfortable and cuts the conversation short, saying he needs to get to a cousin’s event.

How is Evans managing life with Holmes in prison?

Since Holmes entered federal prison in May 2023, Evans has been raising their two children in Austin, Texas, bringing them to visit her at the federal prison camp in Bryan. Holmes is expected to transfer to a halfway house outside Austin in August.

In an appearance last week on the tech podcast “All-In,” Evans described the difficulty of the experience. “It’s hard because I’m building a business and I’m trying to free my wife from federal prison and I’m raising two kids,” he said.

Though Evans routinely refers to Holmes as his wife, Holmes said in a 2025 interview from prison with People that they had not legally married: “Maybe we’ll get married someday, but our bond is more than a piece of paper.” The two got engaged in 2018, reportedly at a Taylor Swift concert.

Is Evans trying to revive Theranos?

After graduating from MIT, Evans reportedly attempted to launch a medical concierge service before working at companies including LinkedIn and Luminar Technologies, which developed lidar systems for autonomous vehicles.

In 2022, he founded Haemanthus, a biotech startup developing technology to analyze biological samples using lasers. The company hopes to make diagnostic testing cheaper and more accessible — a mission that may sound awfully familiar to anyone who followed the rise and fall of Theranos.

Haemanthus has reportedly raised millions of dollars but has yet to release a commercial product. Eric Potma, a UC Irvine chemistry professor who consults for the company, told Wired this week that its technology is worth exploring despite significant technical challenges. “The engineers at Haemanthus are legit,” he said.

Holmes’ name does not appear in Haemanthus’ incorporation documents, according to Wired. But in the documentary, the couple is shown discussing plans for a new diagnostic venture, with Evans speaking openly about his desire to revive her original ambitions.

“The idea is to put the band back together and do it all again,” Evans tells Fielder.

How has Evans responded to ‘You Can See Everything’?

Evans and Holmes agreed to participate in the documentary in hopes of changing the public perception of her. Early in the film, Evans explains that they wanted to give the filmmakers extraordinary access to their daily lives, embracing what he calls “radical transparency.”

But Evans’ commitment to transparency had its limits. In the film, he repeatedly tries to shut down uncomfortable conversations and, in a meeting reenacted for the cameras, demands a share of the documentary’s profits — an arrangement Fielder fears could compromise the project’s integrity. Evans ultimately agreed to forgo payment.

At the documentary’s surprise premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in September, Fielder acknowledged that his relationship with Evans had deteriorated as the project unfolded.

“We felt Billy was trying to exert a lot of control over the process, and it sort of caused our communication to break down a little bit,” Fielder said during a Q&A after the screening. “The challenging thing is he’s sort of a conduit to her.”

Speaking on the “All-In” podcast before seeing the finished movie, Evans acknowledged that participating might turn out to be a mistake. “I haven’t seen it yet,” he said. “I might think this is like the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”

Evans attended a private screening of the documentary on Oct. 16, followed by an off-the-record conversation with Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur known for his elaborate efforts to reverse aging.

In a post on X the following day, Johnson called the film “a masterpiece” and described Evans as “magnanimous in conversation.” Though Johnson said he gave Evans every opportunity to defend himself and “strike back because Fielder roughed him up,” Evans declined.

Evans replied publicly, thanking Johnson for treating their conversation with care. “When the world is against you and the pain is so real,” Evans wrote, “it means so much to have people like you show such kindness.”

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s experimental Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is not only one of the most buzzed-about films of the year; it has proved the hype at the box office, already making $15 million during its opening weekend.

If you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading now and come back after you do. And if you have seen it, don’t miss our spoiler-heavy revelations about “You Can See Everything.”

One last warning before we proceed: Spoilers ahead.

Before “You Can See Everything” put Holmes back in the spotlight, Amanda Seyfried portrayed the Theranos CEO in the Hulu limited series “The Dropout,” winning a lead actress Emmy for the role.

In the documentary, Holmes tells Fielder she has never watched the series. After his prodding, they watch it together — along with Holmes’ partner Billy Evans — in a Del Mar beach cottage days before she is set to leave her family, including two young children, to report to a Texas prison to serve an 11-year sentence after being convicted of fraud.

We revisited our previous coverage of “The Dropout,” including what Seyfried told us about preparing for the role and what Liz Meriwether, who created the series, had to say about the project.

In an interview with The Times in 2022, Seyfried recounted telling filmmaker David Fincher about the role, who made a suggestion about how to play Holmes: “He turned to me, and he said, ‘This Theranos girl, she’s not listening.’ And I was like, ‘You’re right!’ Watch her listen. She’s playing listening. … Everything is like, ‘Do you see me listen? Make sure you see that I’m listening to you.’ It’s one of the things that helped her succeed. So much of it was an act, and her bubble was bound to burst. It must have been so tiring.”

During “You Can See Everything,” we observe Holmes watching Seyfried dance in a scene from “The Dropout,” a much-memed moment in the series.

“My favorite thing was getting to express Elizabeth Holmes’ frustration through dance. A character working her s— out. A lot of it was based on the fact that she was a dance student,” Seyfried said.

Holmes cringes at seeing it portrayed onscreen (if you’ve ever had your own dancing or karaoke sessions broadcast, you know the feeling).

In the documentary, Holmes and Evans also claim research wasn’t done before creating the series. Seyfried told us she spent months listening to the 10 hours of deposition tapes in preparation, something she also mentions in “You Can See Everything.” The actor, in a separate interview with The Times published in March 2022, also spoke about how she learned to mimic Holmes’ baritone voice.

Meanwhile, for the dialogue in “The Dropout,” Meriwether discussed getting access to texts sent between Holmes and her former romantic partner, Theranos COO Sunny Balwani, in an essay she wrote for The Envelope in August 2022.

“I had been on conference calls with lawyers for hours discussing every detail, every word, every action line in every script,” she wrote. “The writers had to justify our choices based on the facts we had, so we had scoured the source material, trying to piece together the mystery of what had happened between Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani behind closed doors at Theranos. And here I was about to open an attachment with the actual text messages that Elizabeth and Sunny had written to each other. It was thrilling and infuriating.”

Dive deeper into “The Dropout,” including the final episode in which a fictional version of Evans appears, with our previous coverage below.

Nathan Fielder would rather you not read this article. At least not until you’ve seen his new movie.

He has a point.

Now in theaters, “You Can See Everything,” the nearly three-hour documentary Fielder co-directed with filmmaker Lance Oppenheim about convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, is full of head-spinning twists and turns best left unspoiled, and the filmmakers have gone to extreme lengths to keep them that way. At its secret premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last month, audience members were required to lock their phones in pouches and warned that security guards with night-vision goggles would be watching for anyone trying to record the screening. Afterward, Fielder pleaded with the crowd to keep the film’s biggest surprises to themselves.

Holmes was convicted in 2022 of defrauding investors in her failed blood-testing company and sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison. Fielder and Oppenheim began filming her and longtime partner Billy Evans, an MIT graduate and heir to a family-owned San Diego hotel business, shortly before she reported to prison in 2023, gaining extraordinary access to the couple and their two young children.

Holmes and Evans welcomed the cameras, hoping they would help vindicate her. But the closer Fielder and Oppenheim got to the couple, the harder it became to distinguish candor from calculated performance. Fielder, whose series “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal” put real people through elaborate, often uncomfortable experiments, began to wonder whether the tables had been turned.

“I really am struggling to this day to understand exactly what I experienced in this,” Fielder admitted during a post-screening Q&A at Telluride. “I don’t quite know what I went through.” He said he hoped audiences might help him make sense of the “glitchy feeling” it left in his head.

Having seen the film twice, we’re not entirely sure we can help him.

In deference to Fielder’s wishes, this is your last chance to turn back: Major spoilers follow. For those still with us, here are 10 of the film’s strangest moments — by no means the only ones — along with a few clues from Fielder himself about how they came to be.

Evans takes ’radical transparency’ too far

Evans has a theory about why the world sees his partner as a monster: Nobody really knows her. “In the absence of knowing somebody, it’s really easy to make them feel other and scary,” he tells the filmmakers. His proposed solution is “radical transparency” — a familiar Silicon Valley mantra with an ironic resonance given Theranos’ notorious culture of secrecy. The filmmakers are allowed virtually unlimited access to the family’s life, with Fielder even invited to move into their rented house in Del Mar, near San Diego. In one scene, Evans stands completely naked in the shower, brushing his teeth with the bathroom door wide open and the cameras rolling, as Fielder stands awkwardly nearby. At Telluride, Fielder, who had initially planned to stay behind the scenes, admitted he was still perplexed by the couple’s openness. “I’m a weird guy — why do they want me there?” he said. “That messed with my head a little bit.”

Fielder observes Holmes and her family in a scene from the documentary “You Can See Everything”

(A24)

Theranos, the sequel

A federal fraud conviction apparently hasn’t ended Holmes’ ambitions to revolutionize medical testing. Before heading to prison, she and Evans begin laying plans for a new venture involving lasers and artificial intelligence that Evans describes as “2.0” — a chance, he says, “to put the band back together and do it all again.” Holmes declares, “From wherever I am, I’m going to continue to work inventing, even if it’s inventing from a cage.”

Holmes claims she’s never told a lie

For someone convicted of defrauding investors, Holmes has a remarkably uncomplicated view of her own honesty. Asked by Fielder whether she’s ever told a lie in her life, she replies, “I don’t think so.” Pressed — surely she’s pretended to be sick to get out of a party? — she concedes she has, explaining that she thought he meant the criminal case against her. In a scene that became the centerpiece of the film’s teaser trailer, Holmes fixes Fielder with an unwavering stare. “Why would I deceive you?” she asks. “There’s no reason for me to do that.” When Fielder asks whether she’s being real with him, she doesn’t miss a beat: “I’m always being real.”

The Theranos device gets a second look

Holmes hauls out of storage the infamous Theranos device, the machine that helped bring down her company. “So this is the famous scam device,” Fielder says. “It is not a scam device,” Holmes replies. When she insists the machine can perform any medical test, Fielder finds himself drawn into an absurd debate over the meaning of the word “can.” Did she mean it could actually perform those tests, or that it theoretically would once the necessary chemistry had been developed? The man who has made a career out of baffling other people seems genuinely baffled himself, reduced to explaining the word “can” to the founder of Theranos.

Holmes and Evans enter federal court in 2022.

(Nic Coury / Associated Press)

Elizabeth Holmes meets Abbott and Costello

Still trying to make his point, Fielder turns to Abbott and Costello. He plays Holmes the classic “Who’s on First?” comedy routine — two people hopelessly talking past each other. Holmes watches politely and says she finds it funny. But she seems to have missed the central joke: The first baseman’s name is actually Who. “I didn’t pick it up,” she admits. Fielder’s attempts to explain the joke and why he showed it to her get him nowhere. Evans, watching the exchange, regards his wife’s difficulty following the joke as further evidence that her mind simply works differently from everyone else’s.

Fielder gives Holmes an escape kit

On the morning Holmes is due to report to prison, Fielder arrives with a parting gag gift: hair dye and glasses, in case she’d prefer to disguise herself and flee the country. Fielder is famous for excruciatingly awkward deadpan comedy, but Holmes’ parents are there, the family is preparing for an emotional goodbye and he seems to realize almost immediately that he has misjudged the situation. “I didn’t know your parents would be here,” he says, assuring everyone that it’s “just kind of like a joke.” The more he tries to explain himself, the more uncomfortable things become. “Maybe not appropriate for the moment,” he concedes.

Amanda Seyfried becomes a surprise co-star

Seyfried won an Emmy for playing Holmes in Hulu’s “The Dropout,” which Holmes had avoided watching for fear it would be too emotionally disturbing. Fielder persuades Holmes to watch it for the first time, on a laptop in the couple’s bed. She soon breaks down in tears and asks him to turn it off. Later, Fielder visits Seyfried at her apartment and shows her footage of Holmes watching her performance. So we watch Seyfried watch Holmes watch Seyfried playing Holmes as Fielder watches her. And things only get weirder from there.

At Telluride, Fielder said the filmmakers initially doubted Seyfried would want to participate. But after a brief phone call, she invited them over and agreed to be filmed. Neither side knew where things would lead. “It just actually evolved in that organic way, which was really exciting,” Fielder said.

Seyfried as Holmes in a scene from Hulu’s “The Dropout.”

( Beth Dubber / Hulu)

Seyfried plays detective

Seyfried soon finds herself reenacting Holmes’ conversations with Fielder as he tries to make sense of their encounters. She becomes so invested that she joins Fielder on a visit to Evans’ home, hoping she might get him to open up in ways Fielder can’t. “I feel like an undercover cop right now,” she says, clearly getting a rush. There, after meeting the couple’s children, she unexpectedly winds up on a prison phone call with Holmes herself. With only two minutes for the family to talk, Seyfried suddenly seems mortified to be intruding. “I’m so sorry — I don’t want to ruin your two minutes with your beautiful family,” she says. Fielder, naturally, has a camera running.

Evans takes control of the narrative

With Holmes behind bars, Evans seems determined to manage her public image himself. Armed with power of attorney, he takes over her verified X account, posting messages in her name, some of which sound nothing like the carefully controlled Holmes, including one telling another user to “f— off.” “There’s just so much trust that most things I don’t really consult her on,” Evans says at one point. “I know what she’d want.”

Evans’ attempts to steer the documentary itself begin even before Holmes reports to prison. In a meeting later reenacted in the film, after Holmes leaves the room, he raises the subject of money with Fielder, Oppenheim and executives from A24, the studio behind the film, demanding a share of the profits. Fielder says A24 reluctantly agreed, leaving him worried that the integrity of the project may have been compromised. When Holmes later insists she has no financial interest in the film, Fielder is taken aback. Either she’s “fully sincere,” he tells Seyfried, or “she honestly might be the most manipulative person that’s ever lived.” (The film notes at the end that Evans later changed his mind and decided not to accept payment.)

On Oct. 5, Holmes’ X account promoted the documentary with a tantalizing warning: “I really don’t think you are ready for this doc.” Whether that was Holmes speaking or Evans speaking for her is anyone’s guess.

Seyfried confronts Evans

Things turn ugly during that same visit to Evans’ home. A conversation about conjugal visits and Evans’ sex life gives way to a heated argument over his use of Holmes’ X account. Evans brings up the social media backlash Seyfried faced for criticizing Charlie Kirk after his shooting death, then attacks her portrayal of his partner in “The Dropout.” Soon he’s threatening vengeance against people he believes have wronged Holmes. “I’m going to ruin their lives,” he declares. Asked whose lives he means, Evans replies, “F—ing everyone. I’ve got vengeance in my heart.”

Later, away from Evans, Seyfried offers her own assessment: “He is bat— crazy.”