Some time ago, Alex Gibney got curious about how Elon Musk accumulated impossibly vast amounts of wealth and power. So the Oscar-winning documentarian did what he does best, spending four years of deep research into Musk's world to create a film that's nearly as many hours long, each minute kept riveting by a trove of dreadful facts, videos, legal documents and interviews with people close to the tech entrepreneur. "I started out as — if not an admirer — at least somebody who is sort of interested in what he was doing and liked it," Gibney told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep.
Gibney, who narrates the film, says he was a "proud" owner of a Tesla Powerwall energy storage system at his home and Tesla solar panels on his roof. But Gibney's perspective shifted as he prepared his film, Musk, which opens in theaters Friday. It's due to stream on HBO in a few months.
"I became increasingly resentful 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 that's behind the Grok AI assistant. The leadup to the film's release has seen some controversy after Musk used several insults to describe Gibney — "an idiot" was among the mildest ones — and threatened a defamation lawsuit over the film.
In a letter sent to Gibney's Jigsaw Productions company that emerged in September, Musk attorney Alex Spiro focused on an exchange between Gibney and Ashley St. Clair, a one-time MAGA influencer who had a child with the billionaire. Clair describes in the film text messages Musk sent her before the November 2024 presidential election in which he said he was "feeling more optimistic" about Donald Trump winning because "tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix." Musk further told St.
Clair that he planned on tapping "'lasers' from space," adding that "I have over 10 thousand 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 responds, "I don't know where else he has lasers." NPR has obtained and authenticated the texts between Musk and St.
Clair, which were sent on Oct. 6, 2024. Spiro's letter, which NPR has also reviewed, says that Gibney made a "false" insinuation that SpaceX's Starlink satellites somehow uploaded votes for Trump in swing states, a debunked conspiracy theory. "We don't claim that he changed votes in the 2024 election.
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