Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, gestures on stage at Capital One Arena after President-elect Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States in Washington, DC, Monday, January 20, 2025.
Ken Cedeno/UPI/Alamy Live News
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Ken Cedeno/UPI/Alamy Live News
A while ago, Alex Gibney became curious about how Elon Musk amassed incredibly vast amounts of wealth and power.
So the Oscar-winning documentarian did what he does best, spending four years of extensive research into Musk’s world to create a film that lasts almost as many hours, with every minute captivated by a trove of gruesome facts, videos, legal documents and interviews with people close to the tech entrepreneur.
“I started out as — if not an admirer — at least someone who was sort of interested in what he was doing and loved it,” Gibney said. Morning edition host Steve Inskeep.
Gibney, who narrates the film, says he was a “proud” owner of a Tesla Powerwall energy storage system in his home and Tesla solar panels on his roof.
But Gibney’s perspective changed as he prepared for his film, Muskwhich hits theaters Friday. It is expected to air on HBO in a few months.
“I became more and more irritated and angry. When (Defense Secretary) Pete Hegseth basically said that they were now going to use xAI to be fully integrated into the Department of War, it was like an out-of-body experience,” he said, referring to the artificial intelligence company founded by Musk and the origin of the Grok AI assistant.
Alex Gibney spent four years making his nearly four-hour film Musk.
Puzzle productions
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Puzzle productions
Threat of lawsuit
Lead-up to the film’s release sparked some controversy after Musk used several insults to describe Gibney – “an idiot” was among the mildest – and threatened defamation suits over the film.
In a letter sent to Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions company and published in September, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro focused on an exchange between Gibney and Ashley St. Clair, a former MAGA influencer who had a child with the billionaire.
St. Clair describes in the film text messages Musk sent him ahead of the November 2024 presidential election, in which he said he “felt more optimistic” about Donald Trump winning because “tomorrow we trigger the anomaly in the Matrix.”
Musk further told St. Clair that he plans to harness “lasers” from space, adding that “I have over 10,000 lasers in space right now.”
In the film, Gibney asks St. Clair if she believes Musk’s texts referred to satellites owned by his rocket company, SpaceX. She replies: “I don’t know where he has lasers.”
NPR obtained and authenticated the texts between Musk and St. Clair, which were sent on October 6, 2024.
Spiro’s letter, which NPR also reviewed, says Gibney made a “false” insinuation that SpaceX’s Starlink satellites downloaded votes for Trump in swing states, a debunked conspiracy theory.
“We’re not claiming that he changed votes in the 2024 election. All we’re doing is showing that he bragged to his lover that he had special access to understand the outcome of the election in a way that others didn’t have,” Gibney told NPR. “Was he lying to her or was he bragging or telling us something we shouldn’t know? I don’t know. It’s up to the viewer to decide.”
Gibney, who has previously investigated Enron and Elizabeth Holmes, head of a blood-testing start-up, in his films, said that when he trained his lens on Musk, he prepared himself for the possibility that the maverick CEO might try to sue him.
“We had a battery of lawyers reviewing everything we did. I actually hired an independent fact-checker to check our own fact-checkers. So against the richest man, the truth is not always a defense, but I rely on his commitment to the absolutist principles of free speech.”
Gibney also noted that a lawsuit would also trigger a discovery process through which he could subpoena Musk’s internal documents.
Oversold products?
Taking a closer look at SpaceX and Tesla, Gibney noticed that although both companies “had achieved great things technologically…their stock prices were way out of proportion to their actual economic value.” The filmmaker claims that Musk achieved this by overselling his products.
SpaceX performed a vital service by transporting equipment into space…by developing rockets that could be reused at a lower cost.
But the film says Musk presented the company as an even grander enterprise, still on the verge of colonizing Mars.
Tesla made popular electric cars, but the film claims Musk oversold them as autonomous.
According to the movie, they weren’t made with enough sensors for that, which is why some crashed.. “This is a level of overpromising that leads to fraud,” Gibney said.
NPR contacted Spiro, Musk’s lawyer, about the specific claims made in the film, but did not receive a response.
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Kaïté….
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