Inside Elizabeth Holmes's Desk, Rebuilt From 1,000 Trial Documents
Extend engineer Bo Lau has built a website that puts the visitor in the chair of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes. The project was described on October 8, 2026 as a simulation of her desk assembled from court records TechCrunch.
The site draws on more than 1,000 emails, slides, texts and documents from United States v. Elizabeth Holmes, the criminal case against her. They are arranged as one workspace, with each object placed where it might have sat in daily use.
Users browse trial documents through simulated iPhone and laptop screens that copy Holmes' devices. Open the laptop. Check the phone. Documents load inside the simulated screens.
A separate module lets users run the Theranos Edison machine. Edison was meant to extract large amounts of health data from a single drop of blood. The simulation presents the operating sequence from the operator side.
On June 14, 2018, a grand jury returned an indictment, a formal criminal charge, against Holmes and Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani Department of Justice. Holmes' jury trial lasted over three months, with over 900 exhibits, items entered as evidence, and testimony from 32 witnesses HHS. Holmes testified for 7 days in her fraud trial ABC News.
Lau is using the project to promote an Extend watch party for Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes documentary titled You Can See Everything. The site links the archive to the screening.
The broader context here for technologists is the design choice. Court exhibits are public but rarely legible. They arrive as flat files, stripped of workflow and sequence. Lau has restored sequence by mapping documents to devices and devices to a desk, like sorting loose printouts back into folders. For engineers used to debugging complex systems from logs, the parallel is immediate. Context changes interpretation.
In my view, projects like this correct a specific failure in how the industry remembers its failures. Postmortems, reviews written after a failure, tend to compress years of incremental decisions into a single narrative. A searchable workspace resists that compression. It forces the reader to encounter routine messages alongside consequential ones, product slides alongside internal correspondence. Understanding builds slowly.
The wider pattern here is access. Tools for publishing interactive archives have matured so one engineer can repackage a federal trial as an explorable interface. That capability will be reused. Future corporate collapses, product recalls and security incidents will get the same treatment. Done carefully, that gives practitioners and the public a better way to study primary records directly.
