The Word 'Can' Is Why Elizabeth Holmes Never Technically Lied, a Deception Expert Argues

A24's documentary "You Can See Everything," from director Nathan Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim, has turned into one of the year's biggest nonfiction box office stories, grossing roughly $15 million off an 855-theater run, the largest debut for a nonmusic documentary since "Fahrenheit 9/11" in 2004. The film revisits the rise and fall of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, with Amanda Seyfried reprising her Emmy-winning performance as Holmes in reenactments woven through the 174-minute runtime.

What's driven much of the online conversation around the film isn't the box office number but a single word: "can." A viral TikTok analysis from Nick Brody, a communication studies professor at the University of Puget Sound who teaches courses on lying and deception, argues the documentary hinges on exactly how that word was used. Holmes maintained throughout the film, as she has publicly for years, that she never lied. Brody's point is that she may not have had to, technically, to mislead people.

The difference between lying and 'paltering'

Brody draws a distinction between outright lying, a false statement made with intent to deceive, and what deception researchers call "paltering": making technically true statements that are crafted to leave a false impression. When Holmes said Theranos's blood-testing technology "can" run any test, Brody argues, the claim was defensible as a statement about theoretical capability rather than a promise that the technology was ready for real patient use. That gap between what a device can theoretically do and what it was actually doing, whistleblower Tyler Shultz has separately noted, showed up in the difference between the equipment Theranos displayed on camera for media and investors and the equipment actually used to run patient tests.

Fielder himself has said he came away from making the film without a settled view of Holmes's honesty, noting that she "seems so genuine at times" even as the facts of the case point the other way. A federal jury convicted Holmes in 2022 on four counts of investor fraud, and an appeals court upheld that conviction in 2025, leaving the legal verdict clear even as the documentary leans into the murkier question of how she talked her way there.

Holmes isn't the only example

Brody's TikTok analysis situates Holmes within a longer tradition of carefully staged demonstrations in tech and business. Steve Jobs's 2007 iPhone unveiling famously relied on a prototype that worked only in a narrow, pre-tested sequence of steps. Tesla's widely circulated demo of a Roadster that could supposedly fly has yet to be matched by an actual production vehicle, with the car's release now pushed to 2028. For Brody, the appeal of the Holmes documentary isn't really about one disgraced founder; it taps into a broader, present-day anxiety about institutional trust, from contested elections to AI-generated content, where the hardest question isn't whether someone lied outright, but whether a technically true statement was built to deceive anyway.