Step Inside Elizabeth Holmes’s Office: Engineer Builds Immersive Theranos Trial Simulator

With over a thousand emails, internal slides, text messages, and official corporate documents unveiled and made public during the landmark United States v. Elizabeth Holmes criminal trial, the American legal system’s transparent discovery process has once again yielded an unexpected cultural artifact. Capitalizing on this trove of public record, Extend software engineer Bo Lau has created an interactive website that meticulously simulates what it might have felt like to sit at the chief executive’s desk at Theranos right before the company’s meteoric rise came crashing down.

The virtual environment conjured by Lau is ambitious in its granular attention to detail, transporting visitors directly back to 2016. It is a nostalgic and slightly jarring technological time capsule from an era when iPhones still featured physical home buttons and users had to manually slide their fingers across the screen to unlock the device. Even the virtual MacBook Air populating the workspace runs on the classic OS X El Capitan operating system, anchoring the simulation firmly in the mid-2010s corporate aesthetic of Silicon Valley.

Users navigating the digital ecosystem can freely click around the environment, granting them virtual access to look through the exact documents made public from the federal court case displayed directly on Holmes’s simulated iPhone and laptop screens. In a particularly striking interactive feature, visitors can even operate the Theranos Edison machine—the company’s ill-fated, revolutionary-touted diagnostic device that promised to extract and analyze comprehensive health data from a single, minuscule drop of blood, a technology that was ultimately proven to be a scientific and operational fiction.

While the project initially presents itself as a creative novelty built largely for laughs and internet curiosity, it serves a genuinely functional purpose as an innovative way to peruse the primary-source documents from one of the most infamous corporate fraud cases in modern tech history. Navigating this immersive digital desk setup is vastly more intuitive and accessible than attempting to manually source and sift through thousands of dense PDF files hosted across federal court websites.

Beneath the interactive novelty, however, there is a strategic promotional agenda at play. Lau is actively utilizing the viral simulation to promote an upcoming watch party being hosted by her company for Nathan Fielder’s highly anticipated and secretive documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, titled "You Can See Everything," which recently sent shockwaves through the festival circuit following its premiere at Telluride.

Naturally, the project also serves as a high-profile showcase for Extend, the B2B SaaS company where Lau works as an engineer. According to its promotional materials, Extend specializes in technology that can parse, extract, and split difficult enterprise documents with unmatched accuracy. While the exact mechanics of heavy-duty document parsing might sound opaque to the average casual observer, the fact that the company’s engineering talent can leverage such capabilities to build a fully realized, interactive historical simulation of the Theranos downfall offers a compelling testament to the power of modern software tools.