Elizabeth Holmes is a stain on the reputation of Silicon Valley, yet residents of Silicon Valley are queuing up to watch a documentary about her.

Tech companies across the United States are hosting screening events for "_You Can See Everything", a documentary produced by Nathan Field and Lance Obenheim that tells the story of Holmes and her fiancé, Billy Evans. Venture capital funds are also taking their founders to watch this film. One "Luma" event follows another.

Ironically, Holmes has made the tech industry look terrible. She once peddled grand dreams through her own medical testing company Theranos, but that company ultimately collapsed. Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. She has long claimed her innocence.

Holmes is a typical representative of the scammer culture in Silicon Valley. Whenever Americans talk about founders being scammers or fraudsters, she is often the person cited as an example.

So, why does the tech community still love to follow her so much? I attended a Thursday screening event organized by Extend, a startup company based on the AI document, in order to find out the reason.

Enter the screening event of Extend

Outside Hall 9 of Lincoln Square Cinema in New York AMC, it was packed with technology professionals.

The screening was scheduled to start at 7 p.m. By 6:40 p.m., a group of people had gathered outside, chatting about the industry while admiring stickers customized by Extend. Outside the cinema entrance, I met Bo Lau, the event organizer, who is in charge of developer relations at Extend.

Lau just moved to New York recently, and she said she didn’t want to watch this documentary alone. So she posted about it on X – and since she already has a certain following on the so-called “Tech Twitter”, that also helped a lot.

"At that time, I thought, 'Why not turn this into a work-related activity? That way, I can still get it reimbursed?' " Lau said.

This event received 1,400 registrations, but there were only about 120 seats available, she said. She will soon be flying to San Francisco to hold another screening. She mentioned that the tickets were distributed for free, so Extend gained nothing other than increased brand awareness from this event.

Holmes' X account replied, 'An impressive project.'

Humor and Reflection

This is my second time watching this documentary; the first time was at the New York Film Festival. The audience, who had a stronger sense of technology, reacted in a similar way: there was a lot of laughter, both at Field's awkwardness and at Holmes' strangeness.

The audience didn't react strongly to a (slight spoiler) plot point: after Holmes was imprisoned, her fiancé created a large-scale AI version of Holmes. There wasn't much of a reaction to this scene, which I find a bit strange; perhaps the tech community has become accustomed to AI substitutes by now.

When the film revealed who was actually operating Holmes' X account, there was an even more obvious exclamation of surprise from the audience. However, this was not surprising; after all, it was through X that these people learned about this screening event in the first place.

After the screening, we went to a nearby bar to drink cocktails and talk about the film. The two tech professionals I interviewed had different opinions. One of them felt sad for Holmes after watching it, and then felt even sadder that they felt sad for her. The other believed that the film proved Holmes to be a complete psychopath.

I asked: Why can the tech community mock Holmes so easily? Her grandiose visions sound not much different from what these young AI founders are saying nowadays.

Perhaps because most of the people present were only in their twenties, they had not yet started working at startups when the scandal at Holmes East broke out.

Or perhaps, Holmes has long since become disconnected from her roots in Silicon Valley. Tech professionals seem to regard her as a product of the media – those books, gossip reports, Hulu episodes – rather than a product of her own industry.

A participant told me bluntly: She has become a meme.