Like many people who watched Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s masterful documentary You Can See Everything, I sat down with my friend after our screening to exchange our thoughts on each other. The film revolves around criminal Elizabeth Holmes, former CEO of Theranos who was criminally indicted for defrauding investors, and her husband Billy Evans, who met her sometime after the charges against Holmes were filed, picking up their story a month before his incarceration.
The documentary talks a lot things, but at its core, the main question it asks is whether Holmes is a master manipulator or whether she’s being masterfully manipulated by the men in her life, with multiple parallels drawn between her husband Evans and her former partner, both romantically and in business at Theranos, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani.
At the end of the conversation I had with my friend, I came to the conclusion that this was a Schrödinger’s cat type situation; Holmes is both a master manipulator And has found herself in partnership with other master manipulators, and as a result, she is always manipulating but also always being manipulated, all at the same time. I then arrived at a simpler answer: You Can See Everything is about two people whose heads are so firmly up their asses, and each other, that they form an ouroboros, with no way of knowing where one of them begins and the other ends.
On the subway ride home from the theater, I reviewed the news I’d missed during the day, including Microsoft’s latest financial report, which revealed that once again, Xbox hardware revenue had declined year over year. Following the announcement, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma gave a similar explanation that she has used in the past, saying that the reason sales were down was due to the lack of supply of Xbox consoles to meet demand.
Close to watching You Can See Everything, a three-hour film that lays bare, literally in a single scene, what illusion looks like, this comment from Sharma was the latest in a long line of quotes and business decisions that made me think in the moment, “Here’s a company with its head very firmly up its ass.”
As of this writing, if you live in the US and go to Microsoft’s online store, you can purchase any iteration of the Xbox Series X or S, new or used, and have it shipped within the next few days. Anecdotally, many of my colleagues and I have seen numerous consoles, from each of the big three hardware manufacturers, at local retail stores. Many industry peers living outside the United States, such as former GameSpot editor-in-chief Kevin VanOrd (Belgium), say that Xbox consoles are readily available to them, both online and in stores. In fact, I can’t find any cases of anyone online saying they can’t find an Xbox console.
One of the things that you can see all the focus on that was at the heart of Holmes’ cases is that she told investors that the device made by Theranos was capable of testing drops of blood for any disease. According to Holmes, the Theranos device could perform any blood test with a drop of blood. Ultimatelyonce the technology is developed for each test. In reality, when Theranos was courting investors, the device only had access to data from about a dozen tests at that time, and even then there were numerous errors in its output.
Sharma’s exact quote about hardware is: “Console sales remain supply constrained, with demand outstripping the number of consoles available.” The most reasonable reading of this statement would be that any Xbox console that hits shelves is sold out immediately due to incredible consumer demand and the company can’t keep up with manufacturing. But there is so much readily available evidence that this is not true, so how else could anyone read this statement?
Perhaps the offer does not refer to the consoles themselves, but to the supply of components intended to make them. For all its money and power, even Microsoft must struggle to procure hardware to make its consumer products, as computing costs continue to climb due to accelerated data center construction. Sure, there are Xbox systems on the shelves, but it’s probably harder for Microsoft to stock those shelves than it was a few years ago.
And then there is the fact that there is more demand than consoles available. Technically, one could argue without clear indicators, such as empty shelves, that demand exists. Some retailers have stopped carrying Xbox consoles, such as Costco, citing “business decisions.” While these business decisions are unclear, it would be hard to imagine that they would stop selling Xbox consoles if they sold well. So maybe there are people who want to buy an Xbox, but don’t stock the hardware anywhere locally, not due to supply but a conscious choice on the part of the seller. There might be a large group of people who want to buy an Xbox but can’t due to their affordability, as consoles now cost hundreds of dollars more than they did almost six years ago, when supply really couldn’t keep up with demand. This is, fortunately for Xbox, something that could be said, but it is impossible to prove.
Looking at these words in this light is an absolutely bizarre and unnatural way to read Sharma’s statement, but that doesn’t mean the argument for this interpretation can’t be made, in the same way that Holmes claims she meant something completely different from what investors understood. Even in her explanation of the Theranos device to Fielder in the film, it takes an enormous amount of perspective on the documentarian’s part to extract what she said. Really ” means when it says that the hardware “can” run any type of test. And when he tries to make Holmes understand how her words could be interpreted differently, and let’s be honest, more realistically, Holmes’ defense is that she’s just different and thinks differently than everyone else. Again, something that is impossible to prove.
In the film, while Holmes prepares for incarceration, she and Evans prepare what Evans calls Theranos 2.0. The film alternates between numerous scenes where they discuss ideas, make phone calls with partners, and wax poetic about the potential of technology. This breathtaking montage bears an uncanny resemblance to the sweeping changes coming to Xbox in 2026. Only nine months have passed since Phil Spencer’s departure announcement, and the company has laid off thousands of employees, closed or spun off several studios, repeatedly overhauled its Game Pass subscription, moved the Helix project from a single console to a “family of devices,” created Mythical Achievements, partnering with Hideo Kojima on his Physint project, made backtracked on the company’s cross-platform ambitions, launched its disc-to-digital program, launched vibration-based Xbox Labs seemingly overnight and, of course, the most impactful change of all, changed its brand from Xbox to XBOX.
While I’ll be the first to admit that Xbox needed a radical overhaul after Spencer’s plodding, methodical, and all-consuming reign in the studio, that overhaul had to be more akin to taking a few crucial, calculated shots with a sniper. While some choices have felt like this, like the collapse of the company’s bloated management structure, most decisions have felt more like panicked shotgun blasts you take immediately after hiding behind cover. In most games, those kinds of shots don’t get you very far, and according to industry analyst Mat Piscatella, the same goes for Xbox’s new strategy.
“In terms of actual results, I don’t see anything at the moment. And I’m looking very carefully,” he said on the latest episode of The Game Business. Even calculated plans, like removing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 from Game Pass to encourage sales, didn’t immediately pan out, with Piscatella saying the franchise “lost a ton of engagement” because of the move.
As Holmes and Evans enter the former’s final days of freedom, the two discuss the logistics of how they will continue to have business meetings while Holmes is incarcerated, in the hopes that they will have a working prototype of a new blood testing contraption in less than a year. It’s a moment where you stare with your head in your hands in disbelief. Surely no one could be so out of touch with reality? How do they manage not to understand the reality of the situation in which they find themselves?
With Xbox, and to some extent the video game industry as a whole, hurting more than ever, Sharma envisions a world in which a billion people engage with the Xbox brand every day — a vision that, no matter how much I crunch or fudge the numbers, is nearly impossible to achieve. As I write this article, a new quote from Sharma appeared in the timeline of a CNBC interview. “By FY 2030, our ambition is to be halfway to our long-term goal of daily players with sustained double-digit growth in players and engagement and industry-leading margins,” Sharma said. Having confidence in this extremely ambitious goal while the industry is going through a prolonged and unprecedented phase of uncertainty and instability is a clear example of the meme phrase “You can just say things.”
Of course, internally, Xbox has access to a ton of additional data to paint a clearer picture than those of us on the outside. And the choice to hide this additional information is intentional. At the time of the Xbox 360, Microsoft revealed the sales figures for its…
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