With over a thousand emails, slides, texts, and documents unveiled during the United States v. Elizabeth Holmes trial, Extend engineer Bo Lau created a website that simulates what it might have been like to be the chief executive of Theranos before everything came crashing down.
(Every day, I am grateful to the American legal system for making the discovery process public.)
i built a website where you can sit at elizabeth holmes’ deskopen her macbook, scroll her iphone, run the theranos edison machineher texts, emails, slides, documents, and theranos machine records are real, sourced from exhibits in the united states v. holmes criminal trial pic.twitter.com/5At9T5m3UV
The environment that Lau created is ambitiously detailed, taking you right back to 2016, a time when iPhones had home buttons, and you had to slide your finger across the screen to unlock it. Even the MacBook Air is running OS X El Capitan.
You can click around the environment, which lets you look through the documents made public from the court case on Holmes’ iPhone and laptop screens. You can even run the Theranos Edison machine, the company’s ill-fated device that was supposed to be able to extract large amounts of health data from one drop of blood.
The project seems like it was mostly made for laughs, but it’s actually an interesting way to peruse the documents from one of the most infamous court cases in tech history — it’s a lot easier to navigate this than to source thousands of PDFs from court websites.
There’s another agenda, though. Lau is promoting a watch party that her company is throwing for Nathan Fielder’s upcoming documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, “You Can See Everything.”
Also, of course, she’s promoting the company itself. So, what exactly does Extend do? Apparently, it can “parse, extract, and split your hardest documents with unmatched accuracy.” (I’m not really sure what that means, but if it makes something like this Holmes desk simulator possible, then I guess that means I’m bullish on b2b SaaS.)
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.
You can contact or verify outreach from Amanda by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at @amanda.100 on Signal.
Get 50% off a second passThe Disrupt experience is meant to be shared. Get your pass and bring a colleague, partner, or peer at 50% off. Cover more ground by making connections, building momentum, and discovering what’s next in the startup ecosystem.
Anthropic is giving startups a free year of Claude Team and $1,000 in credits
At 19, founder raises $11M for Ghost, maker of a $3,499 computer for personal AI
Trump unveils his new Super Intelligence Force
Federal judge calls Flock ‘indiscriminate mass surveillance’
Amazon responds to data center backlash, says it no longer uses NDAs
OpenAI safety employee resigns, claiming the company’s ‘culture is broken’
Meta wants your next gadget to be Muse-infused
