Theranos World puts real court exhibits on a fake 2016 MacBook and iPhone. It arrived just as the Holmes documentary became a surprise box office hit.
A website called Theranos World lets you sit at a virtual version of Elizabeth Holmes's desk in 2016. You can open her MacBook and iPhone and read real emails, texts and slides taken from the exhibits in her criminal fraud trial, plus material from Sunny Balwani's case.
That film, You Can See Everything from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, took $15 million in its opening weekend, far above expectations. The site is a fun, easy way to see the Theranos evidence for yourself, but remember it is a curated selection, not the full court record.
You can now open Elizabeth Holmes’s MacBook, scroll through her iPhone and read her real messages, all from your browser. A website called Theranos World recreates the desk of the disgraced Theranos founder as it might have looked in 2016, filled with emails, texts and slides that were entered as evidence at her criminal fraud trial.
It’s a strange idea, and a surprisingly useful one. The Theranos case is one of the most famous frauds in tech history, but the evidence is buried in thousands of court PDFs that almost nobody reads. This Elizabeth Holmes desk simulator turns that pile into something you can explore in a few minutes, and it showed up just as a new documentary put Holmes back in the headlines.
Theranos World puts you in Holmes’s chair just before the company fell apart. You can click on her laptop and phone, open emails, read text threads and flip through company slide decks and documents.
You can also use a virtual version of the Theranos Edison, the machine the company claimed could run a wide range of health tests from a single drop of blood. On the site you load a cartridge and run a metabolic panel. The results arrive with a small line at the bottom saying they are not for medical use, a dark joke given what happened to the real device.
The attention to detail is the fun part. The iPhone has a home button and the old slide-to-unlock screen. The MacBook Air runs OS X El Capitan, the Mac software of that era.
Yes. Creator Bo Lau says the texts, emails, slides, documents and machine records are real and come from exhibits in the United States v. Holmes criminal trial. Material from the separate fraud trial of former Theranos executive Sunny Balwani also appears.
Some of it is oddly personal. One Balwani message, sent while he was rearranging a trip, grandly complains that a change of plans doesn’t serve the soul of the universe. Out of context it reads like a fortune cookie, which is part of the appeal.
Most of the material is more ordinary, and that is what makes it revealing. Scheduling notes, investor slides and internal documents sit side by side, so you get a sense of how much was going on at once inside a company that was promising far more than its technology could deliver.
What makes this possible is that court discovery, the process where both sides hand over evidence, often ends up public. Anyone could have read these files before. Lau just made them far easier to browse.
i built a website where you can sit at elizabeth holmes’ desk
open her macbook, scroll her iphone, run the theranos edison machine
her 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
— bo lau (@bolau_) October 8, 2026
Lau is an engineer at Extend, a company that makes software for business customers that reads and sorts difficult documents. Extend says its tools can parse, extract and split hard documents with high accuracy. A project that turns a mountain of legal exhibits into a clickable desk is a neat demo of exactly that.
There was a second goal. Extend used the site to promote a watch party for You Can See Everything, the new Holmes documentary from A24, co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.
The film has become a genuine hit. It follows the 34 days before Holmes reported to federal prison in May 2023, after Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, gave Fielder and Oppenheim access to their rented home in Del Mar, California. Holmes is serving an 11-year sentence for fraud.
You Can See Everything opened in US theaters in mid-October and took $15 million in its opening weekend across 855 theaters. That was far above its projected $7 million to $8 million, and the best opening for a non-fiction documentary in North America since Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004. The film was made in secret over three years for about $7 million.
Fielder has also said Holmes called him from prison shortly after the release, the first contact in more than six months, and told him she trusted him. He said he didn’t know what she meant by it.
For most people, the takeaway is simple: you can now see the Theranos story through primary evidence rather than headlines. Projects like this show how public records can become interactive history, the way a museum lets you walk through a period room instead of reading about it.
Keep two caveats in mind. First, the site is built on choices. Lau picked which documents to show and how, so it is a curated view, not the full trial record. Second, it is partly marketing for a company and a film screening. It is entertaining and real, but it isn’t neutral.
If you want to try it, start with the emails and texts, then compare what you read with the claims Theranos made in public. That gap is the whole story.
It’s a website built by Extend engineer Bo Lau that recreates Elizabeth Holmes’s 2016 desk, laptop and phone using real exhibits from her fraud trial.
No. It’s an independent project by an engineer at Extend, which also used it to promote a screening of the new documentary.
The A24 documentary opened in US theaters in mid-October 2026 and is playing in cinemas now.
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