Step Inside Silicon Valley Infamy: Engineer Builds Immersive Simulator of Elizabeth Holmes’ Desk Using Real Trial Exhibits

With over a thousand emails, slides, texts, and documents unveiled during the high-profile United States v. Elizabeth Holmes trial, Extend engineer Bo Lau has created a website that simulates what it might have felt like to sit at the chief executive’s desk at Theranos before everything came crashing down. The interactive digital environment offers an unprecedented, albeit uncanny, look into the internal operations of a company that once captivated and ultimately defrauded the tech world.

Every day, many observers of the American legal system express gratitude for the public nature of the federal discovery process, which turns sprawling corporate scandals into an accessible archive of human hubris. Capitalizing on this public record, Lau built a web-based experience where users can literally sit at Elizabeth Holmes’ desk, open her MacBook, scroll through her iPhone, and even interact with the ill-fated Theranos Edison machine.

The digital artifacts scattered throughout the environment—ranging from text messages and internal emails to pitch decks, corporate documents, and machine records—are entirely authentic. They are sourced directly from the court exhibits entered into the record during the United States v. Holmes criminal trial, lending an eerie authenticity to the digital recreation.

The environment that Lau created is ambitiously detailed, transporting visitors right back to 2016. This was an era when iPhones still featured physical home buttons, requiring users to slide their fingers across the screen to unlock the device. Even the vintage MacBook Air featured in the simulation faithfully runs OS X El Capitan, anchoring the experience firmly in the mid-2010s aesthetic of Silicon Valley peak optimism.

Users can click around the environment to inspect the internal communications and strategic documents made public during the court case, viewing them directly as they would have appeared on Holmes’ own iPhone and laptop screens. Furthermore, visitors can run a simulation of the Theranos Edison machine, the company’s notorious and deeply flawed blood-testing device that was marketed as being able to extract a wide variety of comprehensive health data from a single drop of blood.

While the project initially appears to have been crafted mostly for laughs and internet culture commentary, it functions as a remarkably innovative and engaging way to peruse the primary source documents from one of the most infamous corporate fraud cases in modern technology history. Sifting through thousands of unformatted PDFs hosted across various court websites can be a daunting, tedious task, but Lau’s interactive desk makes the historical archive vastly more navigable and compelling for curious observers.

Beneath the novelty and viral appeal of the digital artifact, however, there is a clear promotional agenda at play. Lau is actively using the viral traffic to promote an upcoming watch party that her employer is hosting for Nathan Fielder’s secretive new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, titled "You Can See Everything."

Naturally, the project also serves as a clever vehicle to promote Extend itself. For those wondering how a B2B software company fits into the world of Theranos nostalgia, Extend is a technology firm that boasts the capability to parse, extract, and split difficult corporate documents with unmatched accuracy. While the inner workings of such enterprise technology might seem abstract to casual observers, the fact that Extend’s engineering talent can leverage document parsing to build a fully interactive replica of a criminal mastermind’s digital workspace certainly offers a memorable demonstration of capability.