00:05:34 · Erin Griffith, Rob Copeland
[00:05:34] S3: then You can see everything even? [00:05:35] S2: You can just say... Erin, enough. Come on. And and then proceeds to, you know, not tell you everything that you do want to know. The the big difference between what I was talking about and what was on screen was that on screen, he's so open about how Elizabeth is involved in this. I mean, I would have had no idea last year while I was speaking to him that they had already filmed months or years of footage of the two of them starting this thing together. Yeah. My impression was that she had nothing to do with this company, that they didn't bring her up in meetings. It was like she who must not be named. She's certainly not mentioned in the deck, and that Billy will give you long speeches about how qualified he is to start this, what a brilliant scientist he is, how he helped start this company which helps do, like, radar for self driving cars. So the... It was, like, the biggest inside joke. Right? Because it's a blood testing startup from Elizabeth Holmes' partner. The photographs they're providing look suspiciously identical to the Theranos device, but, oh, goodness gracious. Don't, you know, don't make the connection. I thought that I was breaking the biggest story in the history of technology, business, and media, and it turned out that Billy had been filming a documentary, like, memorializing it for two years.
00:06:55 · Max Read, Rob Copeland, Erin Griffith
[00:06:55] S1: So just to put this in the context of the film. So, 2023, we see them in San Diego. They're both on the phone with what we understand to be potential investors in in this new thing they're starting up. Elizabeth goes to jail. Billy continues working on it. Around 2025, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the directors of the of the documentary, start visiting him in Austin again. And it's around this same time that you are discovering that this startup is coming out, and you eventually published the piece. What was the react... What was his reaction to your piece? [00:07:26] S2: He was not thrilled with the piece. I think it's fair to say. [00:07:30] S3: I mean, he probably was fighting it all along the way. Right? I'm assuming that, like, if they wanted this documentary to be the big reveal of Theranos two point o, your story would have messed that up. [00:07:40] S2: Yeah. He kept trying to sort of push the story down the line, kept saying, oh, you can come visit the lab. You can do a great story of the lab. And then I would say, okay. What's in the lab? And he'd say, well, the lab isn't working yet. So at that point, I'm sitting with my editors, and I'm saying, well, what are we going to see in Austin? And to be clear, he... This startup had raised somewhere around $3,000,000, which much respect to mister Evans is just not enough to start a blood testing company. Think of [00:08:08] S3: all start somewhere. I mean, I think Theranos' first checks were probably very small too, and then they eventually built up to, you know, a 100,000,000 from Murdoch.
00:08:08 · Erin Griffith, Max Read, Rob Copeland
[00:08:08] S3: all start somewhere. I mean, I think Theranos' first checks were probably very small too, and then they eventually built up to, you know, a 100,000,000 from Murdoch. [00:08:15] S1: I would love to start with $3,000,000 personally. Did you talk to anybody who did invest in this business? [00:08:23] S2: I didn't speak to anyone who did, although we did find records of at least one person who had invested in it. He runs a Tapas restaurant in Downtown Austin, and Billy described him to me as a friend. Mhmm. So it seems like it was at that level. [00:08:37] S1: But to your point, Rob, this is not... You know, what we're hearing is a company that's raised $3,000,000, which is two orders of magnitude lower than it would take to sort of think about yourself as a tech player. As far as we know, there are not many notable investors except for this gentleman who owns a tapas bar in Austin. I mean, how would you... I'm trying to think of the right way to ask this question. Is this a real company?
00:08:37 · Max Read, Rob Copeland
[00:08:37] S1: But to your point, Rob, this is not... You know, what we're hearing is a company that's raised $3,000,000, which is two orders of magnitude lower than it would take to sort of think about yourself as a tech player. As far as we know, there are not many notable investors except for this gentleman who owns a tapas bar in Austin. I mean, how would you... I'm trying to think of the right way to ask this question. Is this a real company? [00:08:59] S2: If I were Elizabeth, right, I would say, like, what is a real company? What do you mean by real? The... It's a real company in the sense that it did successfully raise money. It's not a real company in the sense that it has a product that does anything. What really struck me too is... Was the gall. I mean, Billy was going after huge investors. He was going after, you know, Jim Breyer with the... One of the first backers of Facebook. He's going after Michael Dell, probably the most famous investor not named Elon Musk in in Texas. He really thought that he was going to be able to raise money from sort of the top tier for this.
00:09:35 · Erin Griffith, Rob Copeland
[00:09:35] S3: What I thought is so notable about your story too is, like, in Silicon Valley, there's this kind of, like, unspoken rule where if you pass on a company, you you might tell your friends, like, oh, we didn't invest in that. But, like, it sends a really negative signal to the company, and you don't wanna be seen as, like, not founder friendly. And so no investor would ever publicly to The New York Times or anyone in the media say, I declined to invest in this company. And in fact, that's what stopped investors the first time around with Theranos one point o from speaking out and saying, looked at this company, but it didn't pass the smell test for me. They're all kind of worried about coming off as, you know, not founder friendly. And so the fact that you have someone like Jim Breyer in there on the record saying, we looked at this company, and we thought it was no good, and so we passed. It's like, that that is actually extremely unusual. [00:10:24] S2: Well, it sort of speaks also, I think, to the fact that Billy is not someone that anyone thought that they had to protect. You know? There's not a future relationship with Billy Evans that anybody necessarily wanted. [00:10:38] S3: Well, okay. One other question that I had isn't part of Elizabeth's punishment as a felon, now convicted, that she can't be involved in securities? [00:10:49] S2: She can't be an officer for sure. Yeah. Can she informally advise her partner on his company? I mean, how could you enforce that? Right?
00:10:49 · Rob Copeland, Max Read, Erin Griffith
[00:10:49] S2: She can't be an officer for sure. Yeah. Can she informally advise her partner on his company? I mean, how could you enforce that? Right? [00:10:58] S1: Well, I mean, certainly, if it was illegal, you wouldn't wanna have, say, a lot of footage of the two of you making a bunch of investment calls on behalf of the company. [00:11:06] S2: If those calls were made in 2023, I do question their their veracity because this company was not raising money in 2023. [00:11:13] S3: Wait. What do you mean? [00:11:14] S2: If those calls were filmed in 2023 Yeah. That that... There was no Theranos two point... I mean, maybe they were casual phone calls, but those those were not, like, serious. We're about to raise money. The real Theranos starts around 2024, so about a year later. They don't have offices. They're still working out of, like, a a house in in Austin as of last year. Mhmm. So still very, very early start up. [00:11:37] S1: And so at this point, Elizabeth Holmes is in prison. So this is entire... I mean, with the exception of whatever advice she's giving him during their visiting days, this is entirely Billy. Correct. Yeah. [00:11:47] S3: And they have a patent, and she's not on it. [00:11:49] S1: Right. Let me take this in a slightly different direction. Having now seen the movie, and this question is for both of you, what did you make of their relationship?