Elizabeth Holmes Tells Documentary Director “I Trust You” — And He Has No Idea What She Meant

A brief, unsolicited phone call from a federal prison has left the co-director of a new documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes more puzzled than any footage he captured over 34 days living on her property. The three words Holmes chose to close the conversation — “I trust you” — have proven, by Nathan Fielder’s own admission, entirely uninterpretable.

Fielder, a four-time Emmy nominee, told WIRED that he remains genuinely uncertain what Holmes intended by her parting words — whether they signal acceptance, a veiled warning, or something else altogether. Holmes is currently serving her federal prison sentence for defrauding investors, a conviction that stands as the defining legal reckoning of the Theranos scandal. That a figure who built a company on carefully managed perception would choose to close a rare conversation with a filmmaker documenting her downfall by saying “I trust you” is, at minimum, a striking choice — and one that Fielder, for all his analytical attention to her behaviour, cannot yet explain.