An Engineer Rebuilt Elizabeth Holmes's Desk as a Website, and the Blood-Testing Machine Finally Works (Not for Medical Use)

There is a new website on the internet where you can sit at Elizabeth Holmes’s desk. It is called Theranos World, it lives at theranos.world, and it was built by Bo Lau, an engineer at the document-processing company Extend, per TechCrunch and SFist.

The pitch, from Lau’s own post as quoted by TechCrunch, is that you can “open her macbook, scroll her iphone, run the theranos edison machine.” The emails, texts, slides, documents and machine records, he says, are real, “sourced from exhibits in the united states v. holmes criminal trial.” UNILAD Tech reports the creator says the site uses 1,169 real documents from the trial and includes several Easter eggs.

This is, as far as we can tell, the first time the phrase “Easter eggs” has been used to describe the evidentiary record of a federal fraud prosecution, and we’d like to formally note the milestone.

The level of detail is what makes it. TechCrunch reports the simulation is set in 2016: the iPhones still have home buttons, and the MacBook Air runs OS X El Capitan. We checked the live page ourselves. There’s a recreated office desk with a MacBook, an iPhone, a Theranos instrument and a glass of green juice. There’s a mock macOS login screen for “Elizabeth Holmes” that requires no password.

That last detail is the site’s best joke, whether or not it’s intentional. A company whose entire downfall involved what it did and didn’t let people see has been rebuilt as a web page where the login screen simply lets you in. Total transparency, a decade late, available to anyone with a browser. It is the most open Theranos has ever been.

Then there’s the machine. Visitors can run a simulated Edison, the device Theranos claimed could run comprehensive blood tests from a tiny sample like a finger prick. According to SFist, you can load a cartridge and run a metabolic panel, and the results carry the disclaimer “not for medical use.” Wikipedia’s account of the company notes that Theranos was later reported to have run many tests on conventional machines and voided two years of Edison results in 2016.

So the Edison finally does exactly what it says on the label. The label just now says “not for medical use.” Honesty, it turns out, was a one-line fix.

For context, because this is a story about a real case and the facts deserve to be precise: Theranos was founded in 2003 and shut down in September 2018, per Wikipedia. Holmes was convicted in January 2022 on counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and sentenced in November 2022 to 11 years and 3 months. Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani was convicted on all 12 counts against him in July 2022. SFist notes the site’s emails and texts come from evidence in both fraud trials.

None of which is the site’s joke, and none of it is ours. The comedy here is the format: a piece of extremely serious courtroom history repackaged as an interactive diorama, complete with a juice prop.

And, of course, there’s marketing. This is Silicon Valley; even a museum of a startup scandal comes with a call to action. TechCrunch reports Lau’s company, Extend, is promoting a watch party for Nathan Fielder’s documentary about Holmes, You Can See Everything, and plugs Extend’s document-processing product, which it says can “parse, extract, and split your hardest documents with unmatched accuracy.” A paper note on the virtual desk, signed “-Bo,” invites visitors to “Come see the documentary with us on Oct 22nd in SF.” SFist says the film, directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, has played several festivals to acclaim.

Let’s appreciate the pitch for what it is. A document-AI startup took more than a thousand trial exhibits, parsed them, and turned them into a playable demo, which is a better product demonstration than most companies manage with a slide deck. It’s the rare marketing stunt that is also, accidentally, a public-records project. The product is: we can read your hardest documents. The proof is: we read these.

There’s a lesson in that for the whole AI industry, which currently spends a great deal of energy telling people what its models can do. Extend just showed it. Nobody needed a benchmark. Nobody needed a leaderboard. You open the laptop, the password field lets you in, and every email is right there.

That’s the dream of every document-processing company, and also, in hindsight, the nightmare of every startup founder who ever typed something into a company email thinking it would stay there. You can, as the documentary’s title promises, see everything.

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