Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gestures on stage at Capital One Arena after President-elect Donald Trump is 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
Some time ago, Alex Gibney was curious about how Elon Musk accumulated incredibly huge amounts of wealth and power.
So the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker did what he does best: He spent four years of deep research into Musk’s world to create a film that lasts almost as many hours, each 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 a fan, at least someone who was interested in and liked what he was doing,” 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 on his home and Tesla solar panels on his roof.
But Gibney’s perspective changed as he prepared his film, Muskwhich opens in theaters on Friday. It will air on HBO in a few months.
“I became increasingly resentful and angry. When [Defense Secretary] “Pete Hegseth basically said they were now going to use xAI to fully integrate into the War Department, it was like an out-of-body experience,” he said, referring to the artificial intelligence company founded by Musk that is behind 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
The lead-up to the film’s release has seen some controversy after Musk used several insults to describe Gibney (“an idiot” was one of the mildest) and threatened a defamation lawsuit over the film.
In a letter sent to Gibney’s company Jigsaw Productions that emerged 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 before the November 2024 presidential election in which he said he was “feeling more optimistic” about Donald Trump’s victory because “tomorrow we will unleash the anomaly in the matrix.”
Musk further told St. Clair that he planned 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 he believes Musk’s texts were referring to satellites owned by his rocket company, SpaceX. She replies, “I don’t know where else he has lasers.”
NPR obtained and authenticated the text messages between Musk and St. Clair, which were sent on October 6, 2024.
Spiro’s letter, which NPR also reviewed, says Gibney made a “false” implication that SpaceX’s Starlink satellites somehow loaded 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 was bragging to his lover that he had special access to understand the outcome of the election in a way that other people didn’t,” Gibney told NPR. “Was he lying to him or was he just bluffing or was he telling us something we shouldn’t know? I don’t know. That’s for the viewer to decide.”
Gibney, who previously investigated the likes of Enron and blood-testing startup executive Elizabeth Holmes in his films, said that when he trained his lens on Musk, he prepared for the possibility that the maverick CEO would try to sue him.
“We had a battery of lawyers reviewing everything we did. In fact, I hired an independent fact-checker to check our own internal fact-checkers. So against the richest man, the truth is not always a defense, but I count on his commitment to the principles of being a free speech absolutist.”
Gibney also noted that a lawsuit would also trigger a discovery process through which he could subpoena Musk’s internal documents.
Overselling products?
Taking a closer look at SpaceX and Tesla, Gibney noted that while the two companies “had accomplished great things technologically… their stock prices were disproportionate to their real economic value.” The filmmaker says Musk achieved this by overselling his products.
SpaceX provided a vital service, transporting equipment into space… developing rockets that could be reused at low cost.
But the film says Musk presents the company as an even bigger enterprise, about to colonize Mars forever.
Tesla made popular electric cars, but the film says Musk oversold them as autonomous vehicles.
According to the movie, they weren’t made with enough sensors for that, so some crashed.. ““That’s a level of over-promising that leads to fraud,” Gibney said.
NPR reached out to Spiro, Musk’s attorney, about the specific claims made in the film, but did not receive a response.
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Kaity Kline.
