The Frontier

Rob Copeland says Hemanthus pitched at-home blood tests for pets, aiming to cut a veterinary test from about $500 to $1; a USDA document Billy Evans cited did not establish the regulatory clearance he claimed.

Copeland found Hemanthus had raised about $3 million, had no working product, and was still operating from a house in Austin; Evans pursued major investors, including Jim Breyer and Michael Dell.

Aaron Griffith says Evans’s investor pitch emphasized his own credentials while concealing Holmes’s role; Holmes was absent from the deck, and Evans’s patent did not include her. Copeland learned the couple had already filmed their startup story.

Griffith reads Evans and Holmes’s relationship as both romantic and opportunistic: Evans appears to love her while also seeking career and financial upside from her notoriety, including through the film and a digital replica.

Griffith says venture firms have backed controversial founders to signal independence from media criticism, citing Andreessen Horowitz’s investments in Andy Rubin and Adam Neumann; he found few comparable cases involving founders convicted of fraud.

Griffith cites Trevor Milton’s post-conviction company and Billy McFarland’s failed fundraising as rare comparisons; Rob Copeland argues that investors may back Holmes to spite journalists, especially if a pardon gives them a cleaner pitch.

The film reveals Billy Evans running Elizabeth Holmes’s combative, increasingly conservative social account from prison; Aaron Griffith says people in prison often have phones, and guards may prefer inmates distracted by them.

Rob Copeland frames AI infrastructure as a financing risk: CoreWeave borrowed heavily to buy processors and lease data-center capacity, while its falling stock and doubled debt-service costs suggest the financing strain may surface before the technology’s limits.

Copeland says AI companies may need to borrow as much as $10 trillion, while Aaron Griffith links Anthropic’s IPO prospects to whether AI demand can support that spending; Ken Griffin has called the market a bubble.

Aaron Griffith says SpaceX is forming independent-director committees to explore a merger with Tesla, which Elon Musk confirmed on an earnings call; Griffith thinks consolidation could give Musk more control over Tesla spending.

Max Reed says Meta policy chief Joel Kaplan is leaving after shifting the company’s internal and external posture to the right; Reed attributes the departure more plausibly to tenure and exhaustion than to expected Republican losses.

John Carreyrou says Theranos’s Edison could perform 12 kinds of tests, but every result it issued for those tests had to be voided; the Minilab shown in the film was a later device that never produced reliable results or reached patients.

Carreyrou dates Theranos’s full-fledged fraud to fall 2013, when the company launched Walgreens testing before its technology was ready, modified Siemens analyzers, and pre-diluted finger-prick samples that the machines diluted again.

Carreyrou says whistleblower Tyler Shultz tried to warn Holmes and his grandfather before leaving Theranos; the company later pressured Shultz to identify sources and recant, while Holmes appealed to Rupert Murdoch to stop the reporting.

Carreyrou rejects Holmes’s claim that Sunny Balwani alone ran Theranos: texts show the couple managed the company together, while Holmes was CEO, board chair, and held about 90% of voting control. He says she initially hoped to build a real company but knowingly lied once the business failed.

Carreyrou argues Holmes played confused or neurodivergent in the Abbott and Costello scene to support a defense that she experienced the world differently; he says her repeated calculated responses and refusal to accept responsibility undermine that account, while acknowledging her sentence was harsh.