Academy Award winner Alex Gibney is working on a new documentary for HBO, investigating the rise and fall of Theranos, the one-time multibillion-dollar healthcare company founded by Elizabeth Holmes. 

In 2004, Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford to start a company that was going to revolutionize healthcare. In 2014, Theranos was valued at $9 billion, making Holmes, who was touted as “the next Steve Jobs,” the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. Just two years later, Theranos was cited as a “massive fraud” by the SEC, and its value was less than zero.

Drawing on extraordinary access to never-before-seen footage and testimony from key insiders, director Alex Gibney will tell a Silicon Valley tale that was too good to be true. With all the drama of a real-life heist film, the untitled documentary will examine how this could have happened and who is responsible, while exploring the psychology of deception.

“This story is a classic example of truth is more dramatic than fiction,” says Gibney. “The characters are at once larger-than-life and real.”

A Jigsaw Production for HBO Documentary Films; directed and written by Alex Gibney (“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” HBO’s Emmy-winning “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief“); producers, Alex Gibney, Erin Edeiken, Jessie Deeter; editor, Andy Grieve; co-editor, Alexis Johnson; associate producer, Ophelia Harutyunyan; executive producer Graydon Carter. For HBO: executive producers, Sara Bernstein, Nancy Abraham.