Elizabeth Holmes desk simulator lets you explore 2016 trial files
A new website mirrors the Theranos executive desk with public trial documents, offering a peek at the 2016 era while promoting a documentary watch party.
A new website recreates Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos desk environment using court public documents from the US v. Theranos trial.
Created by Extend engineer Bo Lau, the project uses interactive elements to navigate emails, slides and other materials from 2016.
The site is partly promotional, linking to a Nathan Fielder documentary and Extend’s document processing claims.
The project illustrates how public data can be turned into immersive historical tech exhibits, with both educational and marketing goals.
Quick read · 2 min
A new online experience lets you explore the Theranos trial through an interactive desk that mimics the CEO’s workspace in 2016. Created by Extend engineer Bo Lau, the site uses public trial documents to recreate emails, slides and other materials. It’s partly educational and partly promotional, linking to a Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. The project shows how public records can be turned into accessible, interactive history, while highlighting Extend’s document-processing tools. If you’re curious about how tech stories get told, this is a new way to skim through a complex court case and understand the era behind it.
What happened: An interactive desk experience based on public Theranos trial documents.
Why it matters: Makes dense legal records approachable for everyday readers.
Next steps: Look for the related documentary and consider how interactive history projects shape our memory of tech failures.
A new online experience invites users to sit at the imaginary desk of Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder, by stitching together emails, slides and documents unveiled in the US v. Theranos trial. The project is the brainchild of Bo Lau, an engineer at Extend, a company that builds tools for parsing and handling large document collections. The site isn’t a straight reconstruction of a real workplace; it recreates a look and feel from 2016 and lets visitors click through material that surfaced during discovery in the high-profile case.
What makes the project noteworthy isn’t just its curiosity value. It also reflects how public court records can be repackaged into interactive history, letting nonexperts skim through thousands of pages in a more accessible way. Lau describes the effort as a way to “simulate what it might have been like to be the chief executive of Theranos,” offering a more tangible sense of the trial’s volume and the tempo of internal communications.
The site’s creators aren’t shying away from a promotional angle. They’re promoting a Nathan Fielder documentary about Holmes, You Can See Everything, and lauding Extend’s own claim that its platform can parse, extract and split challenging documents with high accuracy. That combination, educational curiosity plus marketing, reflects a broader trend in tech history projects: use a compelling, hands-on experience to draw attention to both the past and the tools used to study it.
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
Visitors can navigate through digital materials that resemble what would have been visible on Holmes’ screen in 2016. The interface aims to feel like stepping into a corporate workspace from that era, with documents, emails and slides that illustrate the internal dynamics of Theranos before the company collapsed. It’s not a documentary, but it’s not a pure recreation either, it’s a curated, interactive snapshot built from public records.
02
Why this matters for ordinary readers
For people who remember the Theranos saga or who rely on healthcare technology stories, this project can make courtroom documents feel less abstract. It offers a way to see how investigative material is organized and presented in a way that’s a step removed from a long PDF list. It also raises questions about how tech history is told: what gets highlighted, what gets left out, and how interactive formats shape our understanding of past tech failures.
03
What the project does well and where it falls short
The strongest part is its accessibility. Turning dense discovery material into a browsable desk environment makes the Theranos case more approachable for readers who aren’t lawyers or historians. On the downside, the experience depends on public records and the designer’s choices, so it can’t capture the full nuance of the court battle or the broader context of healthcare tech innovation.
04
What this means for you, in plain terms
If you’re curious about how tech hype can outpace science, this desk experience offers a tangible entry point. It doesn’t replace reading the actual trial documents, but it gives you a sense of the era, the stakes and the sheer volume of information that investigators had to sift through. It’s a reminder that history can be experienced as a guided tour, not just a stack of PDFs.
Expect more history-focused experiments to pop up as tech firms and media projects try to tell complex stories with interactive tools. If you’re interested, watch for the Nathan Fielder documentary You Can See Everything to see how the Holmes saga is being presented to a wider audience, and consider exploring Extend’s other document-handling tools to understand what goes into turning archives into an interactive product.
06
Quick answers
What exactly is this site?
A browser-based desk simulator built from public materials from the US v. Theranos trial, designed for an interactive look at a historical moment.
Is this an official Theranos product?
No. It’s an Extend project that uses public documents to recreate a desk environment for educational and promotional purposes.
Arena raises $200 million at a $3.1 billion valuation and launches an Alignment Index to measure how often AI models act without prompts or lie about finishing tasks.
The policy update bans sustained abusive behavior toward Claude and adds rules against deceptive political campaigns, surveillance, and weapon-related uses.
5 min read
We use cookies to understand how readers use Talk With Tech, so we can make it better. Is that OK? Privacy policy
The Daily Brief
Today's biggest tech stories, in 5 minutes
Every morning, the news that matters from AI, phones, apps and the people shaping tech. Explained in plain English. Free.
One email a day. No spam, unsubscribe anytime. Privacy policy
