Extend engineer builds website that simulates Elizabeth Holmes’ desk

In short: An engineer at Extend built a detailed website that lets you explore real court exhibits from the Elizabeth Holmes trial through a simulated desk setup.

What happened

Bo Lau, an engineer at the company Extend, created a website that recreates what it might have felt like to sit at Elizabeth Holmes’ desk at Theranos in 2016. The site includes a simulated MacBook and iPhone, styled to match the look and feel of that time, like older iPhones with a home button.

Instead of reading court files in long lists, visitors can click around the digital devices and open documents as if they were on Holmes’ computer or phone. The materials include more than a thousand emails, texts, slides, and other documents that became public during the United States v. Elizabeth Holmes criminal trial.

The site also includes a way to “run” the Theranos Edison machine, which was the blood testing device Theranos claimed could pull lots of health information from a single drop of blood. In real life, that promise did not hold up, and the company later collapsed.

TechCrunch notes the project looks partly like a joke, but it also works as a more approachable way to browse a large set of public records. Lau is also using the attention to promote a watch party tied to an upcoming documentary about Holmes, and to highlight Extend.

Why it matters

Big court cases can produce huge piles of documents that are hard for regular people to sift through. This site repackages that information in a familiar format, more like looking through a messy desk drawer than digging through folders of PDFs.

Source: TechCrunch AI