Playable Elizabeth Holmes desk simulator doubles as marketing for document-AI startup
Bo Lau, an engineer at Extend, built a detailed website that recreates Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes' 2016 desk setup, letting visitors click through emails, slides, texts and documents released during her fraud trial — and even run the company's ill-fated Edison blood-testing device. The project is largely for laughs, but it also promotes a watch party for Nathan Fielder's new Holmes documentary "You Can See Everything" and Extend itself, which the article says can "parse, extract, and split your hardest documents with unmatched accuracy."
It is a culture-marketing stunt rather than a technical advance, though it shows how document-processing startups use viral tie-ins for attention.
With over a thousand emails, slides, texts, and documents unveiled during the United States v. Elizabeth Holmes trial, Extend engineer Bo Lau created a website that simulates what it might have been like to be the chief executive of Theranos before everything came crashing down.
(Every day, I am grateful to the American legal system for making the discovery process public.)
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
The environment that Lau created is ambitiously detailed, taking you right back to 2016, a time when iPhones had home buttons, and you had to slide your finger across the screen to unlock it. Even the MacBook Air is running OS X El Capitan.
You can click around the environment, which lets you look through the documents made public from the court case on Holmes’ iPhone and laptop screens. You can even run the Theranos Edison machine, the company’s ill-fated device that was supposed to be able to extract large amounts of health data from one drop of blood.