Warning: Light movie spoilers below. Read at your own risk.
Even before becoming the stars of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s much-buzzed-about new documentary, Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans were a special kind of couple. Holmes “may have ultimately failed to change the world in the way she set out,” Evans wrote in a letter at the time of Holmes’ sentencing in 2022, “but she has undeniably changed mine.” The Theranos founder, in the hardest years of her life, taught her husband “a patience” that he “would have previously dismissed as unnecessary and soft.”
She brought out his inner light, another sentencing letter from a friend of the couple reports: When they returned from a “monthslong camping trip,” Evans “displayed a new level of compassion in his demeanor, a strong sense of intention with his actions, and a heightened desire to listen to and look at others with purpose.” Whatever others might think, Evans was saying, Holmes wasn’t the only one of the pair that had been given a second chance. And they might get a second second chance with Haemanthus, a company that Evans is keen to reassure social media followers is absolutely—most definitely— “not Theranos 2.0.” A person familiar with the business told The Wall Street Journal that Holmes is not involved.
But viewers of You Can See Everything will watch Evans agreeing to the characterization that he and Holmes are making Theranos 2.0. They discuss the trajectory to make a working prototype of something on camera; they talk about collaborating on product ideas from prison. “To meet her, to spend time with her, that was the intention of the film,” the Austin, Texas-based Evans told David Friedberg, a cohost of the podcast All-In. “I haven’t seen it yet. I might think this is the dumbest thing that I have done.”
So who is Evans? And what is he building?
Long before fathering two children—son William and daughter Invicta—with Holmes, Evans grew up in San Diego in one of the city’s more prominent families, heir to midcentury pioneers in the Southern California tourism industry. His grandparents, William and Anne Evans were “two young hoteliers [who] saw the future,” according to the family’s company website, and opened up what would become a popular resort hotel on a mudflat in Mission Bay in 1953. They added a second nearby, and today own a third in La Jolla. This brought generational wealth. The business passed in part to Billy’s father, also named William.
Billy went to the Francis Parker School, one of the most prestigious private schools in the city. “The Evans family is very well respected in San Diego,” said a contemporary of Evans’ who worked for the family as a teenager, but Billy “always a source of drama, would try to fight to start fights.” He had “affluenza” and was “just your classic spoiled rich kid” in a way that was not true of all his relatives. The inner light would come around later. (Evans did not want to be interviewed for the story and did not answer specific questions.)
After graduating from MIT with a bachelor of science in economics, Evans reportedly tried to launch a startup offering medical concierge services. This failed. He then took jobs in a handful of tech companies, including LinkedIn and Luminar Technologies, a self-driving car company. In 2017, at a “Fleet Week charity event” in the Bay Area, the then 25-year-old met Holmes and was “captivated,” he later wrote the judge at her sentencing, “by her childish wonder and authenticity.”
There was some reporting in the early years that the Evans family was not entirely enthused by this courtship, but doubts seemed to have dissipated by the time of the Holmes trial. Billy’s father, William Evans, showed up to the courtroom incognito, under the alias “Hanson,” identifying himself as a kind of mechanic. (He owns an enormous classic car collection.) To journalists, he defended Holmes’ honor. In court, he turned heads by unwrapping a “large Rice Krispies Treat” whose crinkling foil drowned out the judge on the first day of jury selection, NPR reported.