President Donald Trump, right, speaks during a news conference with Elon Musk in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, May 30, 2025, in Washington.
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Elon Musk has in recent days been targeting his ire at filmmaker Alex Gibney, whose forthcoming documentary, Musk, offers a scathing look at the tech mogul’s rise. Now, a lawyer for Musk is threatening to file a defamation lawsuit ahead of the film’s release next month.
In a letter sent to Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, the company behind the film, Musk attorney Alex Spiro homes in on an exchange between Gibney and Ashley St. Clair, a former MAGA influencer who dated Musk and had a child with the billionaire.
St. Clair described 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.” When St. Clair asked for clarity, Musk said he planned on tapping “‘Lasers’ from space,” adding that “I have over 10 thousand lasers in space right now.”
In the film, Gibney asked St. Clair if she believed Musk’s texts referred to satellites owned by his rocket company, SpaceX. She responded, “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.
In Spiro’s letter, which NPR has also reviewed, he described a debunked conspiracy theory that SpaceX’s Starlink satellites somehow uploaded votes for Trump in swing states. Spiro argued that Gibney promoted that refuted claim in his film.
“Starlink was not connected to vote tabulation. Election officials in multiple states, independent cybersecurity researchers, and fact-checkers publicly refuted the Starlink vote-rigging claim in November 2024, and nothing since has revived it,” Spiro wrote. “Starlink’s satellites communicate by laser inter-satellite link; that is what ‘lasers in space’ describes,” he wrote. “You are therefore on notice, before release, that the insinuation is false, that the material refuting it is public, and that you chose not to be told the rest.”
Jigsaw Productions said in a statement that its “right to engage in open debate and fact-based examinations of powerful public figures” is protected by the First Amendment, adding that it is “something that should be recognized and defended by all Americans, including the associates of Elon Musk, who has proclaimed himself to be a ‘free speech absolutist.'”
St. Clair said Musk’s legal threats are “a joke” in a statement to NPR.
“They are more likely to colonize Mars than win a defamation case against Alex Gibney,” she said. “Alex Spiro is sending fairy dust letters with obtuse legalese.”
Spiro wrote in the letter that Gibney and the production “refused” to hear from Musk’s team, which Spiro described as a “conscious decision to disregard the truth.” But Gibney has said Musk declined to be interviewed for the film. To substitute for the real Musk, Gibney featured a deepfake version of Musk made with AI, who speaks directly to the camera using Musk’s words from public appearances.
Neither Spiro nor Musk has seen Gibney’s documentary, which runs nearly four hours and features interviews with Musk’s first ex-wife, Justine Musk, his father, Errol Musk, the co-founder of Tesla, and a host of former business partners, journalists and other critics of the tech titan.
NPR attended a screening of the sprawling film this week. It covers everything from how Musk was bullied as a child in South Africa and his early fortunes in the dot-com era to his acquisition of Twitter, his stint in the White House and his ever-growing wealth and influence. Gibney’s organizing thesis is that Musk is a self-mythologizer and “stock pumper” who became the richest man in the world by selling the public, investors and the federal government on exaggerated promises.
Musk has taken to X in recent days to attack Gibney’s film as a “hit piece,” writing that the Oscar-winning director’s goal was “fabricating a false film.”
Proving that Gibney’s film is defamatory under the law, however, is another matter entirely.
For Musk to win a defamation case, his lawyers must show Gibney engaged in “actual malice.” In other words, they must prove that he knew an assertion was false and still decided to include it in the documentary, or had “reckless disregard” for whether something was true or not, according to Genevieve Lakier, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
“It’s a very demanding standard, and even if the documentary included a statement that turns out to be wrong, that is not actual malice,” Lakier said.
Otherwise, Lakier said, filmmakers like Gibney have quite far-reaching free expression rights under the First Amendment, especially when it comes to applying scrutiny to public figures like Musk.
“The threat of initiating a lawsuit is used all the time to try to chill and suppress speech,” Lakier said. “It sounds like Musk doesn’t like the documentary, so he wants to do whatever he can to shut it down and intimidate distributors. It would be a much more impoverished democracy if we weren’t allowed to make documentaries about public figures that were critical of them.”
