Tech
You can see every red flag in Theranos 2.0
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Published 10/28/2026 1:00:00 PM
You can see every red flag in Theranos 2.0
You can see every red flag in Theranos 2.0
Knowing common health tech grifts comes in handy for assessing the secretive startups in You Can See Everything.
You can see every red flag in Theranos 2.0
Knowing common health tech grifts comes in handy for assessing the secretive startups in You Can See Everything.
is a senior reporter and author of the Optimizer newsletter. She has more than 13 years of experience reporting on wearables, health tech, and more. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.
This isOptimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewerVictoria Songthat dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here.
From afar, it’s easy to look back at the Theranos debacle and scream at Nathan Fielder that, obviously, Elizabeth Holmes is lying in You Can See Everything. In the weeks since the movie’s release, journalists and whistleblowers alike have rushed to remind moviegoers of Holmes’ numerous documented lies. Chief among the facts: The Theranos device never worked as advertised. But Fielder’s aim with this film wasn’t relitigating Theranos. Even the most mind-bending of three-hour documentaries doesn’t have enough time to fully tackle the quagmire that was the secretive biotech startup.
It’s worth remembering that Theranos was a prime example of overinflating what technology can do. It sure would be nice if a single droplet of blood could be run in a magical machine and beep boop — you’ve got accurate results for over a hundred diagnostic tests. It’s a compelling concept, but the existing science doesn’t support the idea. As I wrote in last week’s Optimizer, you simply can’t test for every disease from blood alone. Sometimes, a blood test is merely part of a multistep process to rule out what you don’t have. A finger prick carries a higher risk of rupturing blood cells, which can skew test results. Your finger is more prone to surface contamination because hands are dirty by nature. Compared to drawing blood from a vein, a finger prick may not be purely blood — it often mixes with interstitial fluid, diluting the sample. Different biomarkers can require wholly different testing procedures, making the small volume collected difficult to work with. These are just some of the practical challenges Theranos had to solve to be better than the clinical gold standard. It couldn’t, and that’s why they had to fake it by bringing in Siemens devices that used traditional blood testing methods.
That makes it even more astonishing that Holmes and her partner Billy Evans spend a chunk of the film actively working on what Evans casually calls Theranos 2.0.
This new venture, Haemanthus, involves a similar diagnostic device that uses… lasers. The official line is that Holmes is not helming the effort, but Evans refers to it as “getting the band back together.” The film purposefully blurs the lines between truth and lies. But with nascent health tech, it’s genuinely hard for the average person to distinguish promising medical advancements from snake oil.
If you left You Can See Everything wondering if there’s any truth to using lasers to diagnose conditions — you don’t have to watch microbiology videos at twice the speed to find out. Instead, here are a few extra tips when it comes to spotting shenanigans straight out of the wellness grifter playbook.
Technology is not magic
In the documentary, Fielder likens Holmes to a magician. Technology, no matter how powerful or well crafted, is never magic.
But going along with Fielder’s metaphor, magicians succeed through misdirection. Evans presents lasers in the film as though they’re a little-known marvel — a key technology Theranos was missing — and that Haemanthus will be the first to make them truly useful. Based on a patent published by The New York Times, Haemanthus uses Raman spectroscopy. For the record, Raman spectroscopy does involve lasers, but it’s not a new technology. It was first discovered in 1928.
In a nutshell, this laser tech is used to identify chemical structures in a molecule. There are myriad biological and medical uses for it, including noninvasively studying tissue samples. But will it, as a New York Times report describes, “identify and qualify biomarkers such as glucose and hormones” and then use AI to “detect cancer and infections”?
Researchers are exploring using this tech to diagnose early-stage cancers. They’re also looking into using it for glucose monitoring. Does that mean this is a better method than what currently exists? Maybe for certain cases, but probably not in every scenario. In medicine, it’s common to require multiple tests for diagnosis. Similarly, there are often multiple ways to treat the same condition. It’s often a game of weighing pros and cons for various approaches. There are too many unknown factors to accurately comment on Haemanthus, but it’s concerning that Evans zeroes in on lasers like they’re a panacea for everything that plagued Theranos.
When investors, journalists, and the public ask hard questions, founders love to sprinkle technology into their rhetoric like it’s fairy dust. You can see it happening right now with AI. But tech is a tool. Any tool will have pros and cons, situations it excels in and scenarios it’s ill suited for. It’s not always a grift, but anytime an executive shows signs of magical thinking or inflates what technology can do, your bullshit alarm should be ringing.
Tech likes to move fast, medicine really doesn’t
In recent history, I can think of exactly one time the public health sector truly hauled ass to make something happen: the covid-19 vaccine. The vaccine took roughly 10 months to develop, compared to the typical five-to-15-year timeline. But even then, it was a Herculean effort requiring global coordination and tens of billions of dollars, largely from the government. (That’s not including the billions invested in researching mRNA vaccines during the three decades prior to the pandemic.) It was a heartening feat of human ingenuity — but again, it took 10 months built on 30 years of foundational research and several billion dollars.
So it’s an immediate red flag when Evans says in the documentary that Haemanthus would have a novel, revolutionary prototype working in about a year. Case in point, he said that in 2023, and it’s already 2026. But even if lasers were the key to everything, there’s no way in hell something like this would breeze through the regulatory process.
Not much is known about Haemanthus. It has no website, unless you count a sparse LinkedIn page that says the company has two to 10 employees and is working on “AI-native sensors for health,” a technology that “captures thousands of biomarkers.” The bulk of what’s publicly known comes from You Can See Everything and a 2025 New York Times article, which states Haemanthus is building a device that uses a “laser to scan blood, saliva, or urine from pets and analyze the sample on a molecular level.” (The startup is apparently aiming to do veterinary tests first before perhaps eventually graduating to humans.) Its “long-term goal” is a “stamp-size, wearable version” of its product for humans, which will “require three years and $70 million.”
This is an incredibly expeditious timeline for any medical device, let alone a novel one. Not least because the biggest names in wearable technology right now can only detect — not diagnose — signs of perhaps two or three conditions. The holy grail is considered noninvasive continuous glucose monitoring, an endeavor that started in 1975 and that Apple has been rumored to be working on for over 15 years now. In 2023, I did a deep dive into why you shouldn’t expect this to arrive on smartwatches anytime soon. The reasons ranged from weak signals and regulatory mazes to skin color impacting how light reflects and battery life. In 2026, not much has changed on this front.
Meanwhile, take the continuous glucose monitor. Attempts to monitor glucose levels started in the mid-1800s, but a portable way to monitor glucose didn’t emerge until the 1960s. The first FDA-approved CGM was the Medtronic MiniMed in 1999, but it could only be worn for three days, and data couldn’t be viewed live. A clinician had to review it and inform the patient afterward. The first real-time CGM wasn’t available until 2004, the first over-the-counter CGMs didn’t hit the market until 2024, and only this year did Abbott announce a CGM that can measure two biomarkers.
AI advancements could theoretically help remove some technological roadblocks that may, in turn, speed up the overall process. But you know what AI doesn’t really replace? The absolutely labyrinthine regulatory approval and clearance process. You can have a product made and ready to go, only to have it held up in regulatory limbo for years. It’s happened to severalWithingsproducts. The infamous wearable taint zapper took six years, an untold number of testing bunnies, and at least a million dollars to hit the market. It’s why wearable companies are currently lobbying in Washington, likely spending mountains of cash to lower these hurdles.
So the next time a biotech startup promises something revolutionary relatively fast, it’s usually a pretty good sign they’re either delusional or not telling you the whole truth.
Beware anyone who doesn’t show their work
Another red flag with Theranos was that the company never published its research or submitted it for peer review. Haemanthus’ pseudo-secrecy — if you really wanted to build in stealth, why would you talk about it at length in a documentary? — is another concerning sign.
Perhaps because of Theranos, health tech companies have begun publishing more of their science. Oura, Apple, and Google are all great examples of companies that have published clinical and peer-reviewed research in reputable journals, as well as white papers explaining their features.
The act of publishing doesn’t get you a hall pass from scrutiny. Science-washingin the wellnessand health sectors is rampant, with some companies using consumer perception studies as “evidence” instead of more rigorous studies. Or, if clinical studies are done, they’re often more of a vanity project than a groundbreaking revelation. Lastly, not all peer-reviewed papers are created equal. You have to be able to read and analyze the fine print to tell if the study itself was done well.
However, the absence of any reviewable research should sound the alarm for anyone who values science. In early 2015, months before the damning Wall Street Journal report, Stanford University professor John P.A. Ioannidis penned a critique of Theranos’ lack of peer-reviewed research in JAMA. Theranos responded by siccing its lawyers on Ioannidis in an attempt to get him to retract his opinion. That’s sketchy as hell — especially for any biotech or health tech company.
Based on these criteria, Theranos and Haemanthus set off a cacophony of obvious warning bells. But they’re not the only ones. Every year at CES, there are plenty of health tech startups peddling dubious concepts and vaporware right next to people genuinely doing the work. Health is the most valuable thing anyone has, so it’s not always easy to see false promises when your eyes are clouded by hope. No one wants to be sick, and technological miracles are an easier pill to swallow than the protracted ups and downs of real science. But if there’s one thing I took away from You Can See Everything, it’s that Theranos’ playbook is still, unfortunately, alive and well.
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Didn’t Microsoft say the next Xbox needed to be affordable?
Didn’t Microsoft say the next Xbox needed to be affordable?
is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
Fortune dropped a bombshell report on the future of gaming this week. According to the publication’s Microsoft insiders, the next Xbox is projected to cost between $1,200 and $1,800 when it arrives in 2028.
My first reaction: The next Xbox is dead on arrival. It’s DOA.
My second thought: Microsoft knows people won’t pay that much. It couldn’t possibly charge that much money if it wants next gen to be a success. “I wouldn’t release it at all,” former Microsoft exec Mike Ybarra recently said.
My third thought: Didn’t Microsoft alreadysay out loud that it knows people won’t pay that much?
- Didn’t old Xbox boss Phil Spencer say “We’re not going to grow the market with $1,000 consoles”?
- Didn’t new Xbox boss Asha Sharma say “We’ve reached a point where it will be hard to imagine that mass audiences can afford thousands of dollars to spend” on a box?
- Didn’t Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball say the entire company would change its practices to make sure it’s affordable?
- Didn’t Sharma say Xbox would need to adopt “radically different business models” to keep Xbox from being too pricey?
Did Fortune get it wrong?
I don’t think Fortune’s insiders are the problem here. With today’s incredibly overpriced RAM and storage, it wouldn’t be surprising if it cost over a thousand dollars to build, package, distribute, and sell “the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation,” as former Xbox president Sarah Bond called the next Xbox back in 2024.
But there are at least five ways the report could be correct without making you pay all that money at once. I just don’t think you’re going to like most of them.
Subsidies: Microsoft could pay to give you a discount
The least-likely possibility is the one Fortune suggests itself. Let’s look at the original quote, bolding mine:
[…] the price of the Helix console has internally been projected to cost consumers between $1,200 and $1,800, unless Microsoft decides to subsidize the cost.
Historically, Microsoft has subsidized the Xbox. Microsoft sold boxes at a loss right out of the gate, making its profits when you buy games and Xbox Game Pass subscriptions instead of on the hardware alone. That’s not our speculation — it’s exactly what Microsoft told The Verge in 2021. In 2023, we learned that Microsoft may have spent $1.5 billion to make sure it could sell the Xbox Series X and S at $499 and $299 respectively, instead of what they actually cost.
But Microsoft has suggested that it’s done with hardware subsidies. “Going forward, this cannot continue,” wrote Sharma in her “Xbox reset” memo, referring to the $20 billion in content, platform, and hardware subsidies Microsoft made over the past five years.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella echoed that idea on the Hard Fork podcast: “No one can accuse Microsoft of not having invested for the last 25 years, and now we have to turn this into a sustainable business.”
It isn’t just new management that’s hinting at no more subsidies: Bond primed the pump for a $1,000 box when she called Helix “a very premium, very high-end curated experience” late last year, comparing it to gaming PCs like the $1,000 Xbox Ally X handheld.
Perhaps Microsoft has changed its mind since then. “We are working very hard to rethink everything that we can about Helix,” Ball said in June, referring to affordability. “The plan’s the plan until it’s not the plan,” Sharma said in February (though not about affordability specifically).
But subsidies would be a tremendous risk if the Helix still plays PC games in addition to Xbox ones. Valve’s Steam is by far the dominant PC gaming platform — so PC gamers who buy a Helix won’t help Microsoft recoup its money.
Subscription: “Get it free with 36 months of Xbox Game Pass and qualifying trade-in”
There’s another way Microsoft could subsidize a $1,200 Xbox.
Today, AT&T will give you a $1,200 iPhone 18 Pro for $0* — if you lock yourself into 36 months of AT&T phone service that costs $100 or more per month and trade in a recent phone, too.
Microsoft could do the same with a new, pricier tier of its Xbox Game Pass game subscription service, effectively bundling the games with the console and making you slowly pay for both at the same time. Perhaps you’ll have the option to buy an “unlocked” Xbox for full price, but it won’t be the norm.
To make it happen directly, Microsoft would need a pricier new tier of Xbox Game Pass, which wouldn’t necessarily align with the company’s recent moves. Sharma actually cut the price of Game Pass Ultimate to $22.99 a month in April, writing that “Game Pass has become too expensive for players,” while removing Call of Duty games and unlimited access to Xbox Cloud Gaming from the deal.
I don’t know if it would work. People feel naked leaving the house without phone service. They might not feel the same about games. Subscription fatigue is real. But if it worked, Microsoft’s moat would be stronger than ever. You’ll be more likely to play the games you’ve already paid for and are committed to keep paying for. Many would get sucked into a profitable upgrade cycle, just like they do with phones, since they can buy the next Xbox for “$0” as soon as it comes out.
Cellphone subsidies have been around nearly as long as pricey phones: The 1994 IBM Simon, arguably the first smartphone, eventually cost half its $1,100 price tag if you signed a contract with BellSouth. My first phone, a Kyocera QCP-6035 with a built-in PalmPilot, was subsidized when it arrived in 2001. So it’s not exactly a “radical new business model,” but it would be new for game consoles.
Rental: Maybe most people won’t own a Helix themselves
It’s also possible that Microsoft simply doesn’t plan to sell a console to the masses anymore — it can sell an $1,800 Xbox to those who can afford “video game ownership” and try to hook everyone else on the Netflix model.
After all, the “K-shaped economy” and RAMageddon have already made gaming PCs and existing game consoles into luxury goods. Society’s wealthier individuals seem perfectly happy to pay inflated prices for the few consoles Sony and Microsoft still pump out.
While PS5 sales plummeted after Sony’s price hikes, that may have been about component shortages rather than decreased demand. Xbox sales reportedly rose over a similar period, and Microsoft has justified repeated, dramatic price hikes on its consoles since May 2025.
“I can tell you definitively, demand for our console exceeds supply. We are putting them in as many stores as possible, we are producing them as quickly as possible. There is a severe limitation to how quickly we can do that,” Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball told The Game Business in June, blaming RAM shortages.
But Microsoft has another way of giving less affluent people access to “next-gen” Xbox power. It can rent you one. The company just launched pay-as-you-go cloud gaming starting at $3.99 for 10 hours of cloud gaming (50 hours for $11.99).
Maybe all of Microsoft’s recent talk about affordability isn’t about the masses owning a next-gen console. Maybe it’s about finding an affordable way for people to “play Xbox” without owning the games at all.
The next gen is the current gen
After Fortune’s report, some of the very first reactions I saw boiled down to this: “I’m out. Forget next gen, I’m going to stick with my existing Xbox/PlayStation/Switch.”
That’ll be the reality for many people if the Xbox costs over a thousand bucks. But if the RAM shortage continues — if Microsoft knows it’ll sell every Xbox it can make to wealthy individuals because it can’t make a lot — it’s not necessarily a huge risk to sell it sky-high on day one.
Perhaps the Xbox Helix will be an early adopter console, the same way the iPhone Duo is an early adopter phone, the same way the Steam Frame is an early adopter headset. These products are selling out instantly despite their high price tags, leaving many would-be buyers in the cold. They’re shipping messy and unfinished, but that’s okay because early adopters want to come along for the ride.
Microsoft knows the same is true of some Xbox buyers, because it helped ship an unfinished $1,000 Xbox Ally X handheld even before the RAM crisis, and the $1,300 Xbox Ally X20 follow-up is already sold out.
But if Microsoft splits the Xbox audience into “have” and “have-not,” it means the next generation won’t truly arrive. Game developers won’t spend all their effort targeting a console people can’t buy. The next Xbox won’t be any more necessary than a PS5 Pro if you already own a PS5. In industry lingo, the Helix would be a “mid-cycle refresh” instead of true next gen.
I wouldn’t hate that, though, and neither would many video game execs. They’ve long complained that the pace of technology has ballooned the cost of building a video game to unsustainable levels, leading to today’s world where too many development teams are cut to the bone right after their games ship.
Former PlayStation and Xbox execs like Shuhei Yoshida, Shawn Layden, and Mike Ybarra have argued that the next gen isn’t necessary.
“Stick with PS5 Pro/Series X until prices normalize. The capabilities of those boxes are both fine for 99% of the audience. No one is screaming ‘I need a more powerful console’ right now,” Ybarra tweeted on October 20th.
“I think [Sony and Nintendo] should try to keep the current generation as long as possible, because I think people are very happy using PS5 and Switch 2,” Yoshida told me on The Vergecast.
“I think we’ve plateaued on the tech, frankly,” Layden told GamesIndustry.biz in 2025. (He’s said similar before and since.) “Make it cheaper and simpler. Let’s do that instead. And let’s find a way to have more hardware companies participate.”
Microsoft and its chip partner AMD have already taken one step to help extend the current generation — AMD’s performance-enhancing FSR 4.1 is coming to Xbox Series S and X, which should make it easier for both to deliver crisp 4K images to your TV.
Pay what you can afford
Even if Microsoft ships a $1,800 console, the company’s been clear it won’t be the only Xbox you can buy. Sharma has publicly said that Helix will be a “family of devices,” which has been broadly interpreted to mean that Microsoft will let PC industry partners like Asus sell their own “Xbox” as well.
If the reporting pans out, that wouldn’t just be a cobranded Xbox Ally handheld that runs Windows — Asus could make a console-shaped box that runs a Windows-based Xbox OS, too.
Some of those partners could offer more affordable, less powerful Xboxes than Microsoft’s own flagship box, perhaps with less storage and memory. Microsoft, too, might have creative solutions for storage, like how the company shipped the Xbox 360 with different-size hard drives, or none at all, to make it more affordable. “We will have to empower customers to have very flexible storage offerings,” Sharma said in June.
Or you could buy another Xbox that’s likely going to continue to count as part of Microsoft’s “family”: the existing Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.
This can all work because games don’t need to target a single console anymore; they haven’t needed to for a long time. An Xbox One game runs on an Xbox One X and an Xbox Series S and an Xbox Series X because they’re all effectively AMD-powered Windows PCs, just with different amounts of performance on tap. The Xbox Helix is a powerful extension of the same continuum. The same is true of PlayStation 4, PS4 Pro, PS5, PS5 Pro, and presumably PS6, minus the Windows part.
Perhaps a particular piece of hardware will stand out as the one developers should target as the baseline for “it looks and runs great on Xbox,” the same way the Steam Deck handheld became a baseline for PC game developers starting in 2022. Maybe, like the Steam Deck and the Nintendo Switch, it’ll help reset our expectations of what a top-shelf game needs to look like.
At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if the existing Xbox Series S will be the one. But it could also be Microsoft’s own next handheld Xbox. Fortune’s insiders say it’s coming holiday 2027.
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