Among the central twists in You Can See Everything, as I understand it secondhand, is that Evans comes out the worst. The news last year that he and Holmes are in the process of launching another medical testing enterprise already raised eyebrows, but as Busis wrote, Evans is portrayed as “a smarmy, self-satisfied svengali figure who sniffs conspicuously and blithely brags about his own prowess in a variety of arenas.” (“I’m pretty strategic and well-resourced,” he tells Fielder at one point. “I know people who can do just about anything.”)
The filmmakers and Evans have since become estranged, according to them. “Near the end of filming, Billy was trying to exert a level of control over the project that made us uncomfortable, and communication with him sort of broke down because of that,” Fielder told the audience at Telluride. As of Wednesday’s premiere, Evans hadn’t seen the film.
In my own efforts to understand Evans, I spoke to people who knew him before he got together with Holmes. He sounded relatively normal, if intense and offbeat—or as normal as one could be while married to this particular cultural figure. “I’ll put it in the context of, he fit into Silicon Valley,” another employee at Luminar, the self-driving car company where Evans was working when he met Holmes, told me. “It’s a very unique crowd, just really smart people, but also niche smart. … These are people where you wonder, ‘Where does your brain come from? This is so bizarre.’ Billy fit right in, and it’s an element of level of intelligence.”
“I felt a little bit silly when Billy started talking about dating Elizabeth Holmes, and my thought was, ‘Wait, I know that name,’” the employee recalled. “And he’s like, ‘Right, founder of Theranos.’”
“That was the most I understood of his personal life outside of just getting shit done at Luminar,” they went on. “So for him to be talking about her and meeting her, I thought, Whoa, he’s crazy about her right off the bat.”
