Only one person agreed to be Alex Gibney’s new Elon Musk documentary immediately: Musk’s father. “We had Errol Musk at ‘hello,’” Gibney says.
Eventually, the director would speak with scores of Musk’s associates for his film. His first wife, Justine Musk, appears, as does his ex-girlfriend Ashley St. Claire. Journalist Kara Swisher, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, myself, and WIRED global editorial director Katie Drummond also spoke to Gibney for Musk, which hits theaters nationwide on Friday. But landing Errol Musk, with whom the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has a complicated relationship, was a watershed.
“Everybody else took a lot of persuasion,” Gibney says. “It was very difficult to get people to appear because the risk profile for talking about Musk in a way that was honest was high.”
Once Gibney interviewed all of his subjects, he had enough material to make a documentary that runs nearly four hours, including a 10-minute intermission. It’s a damning portrait of the trillionaire CEO, detailing how much of his genius is based on his formidable ability to promote his own mythology—and the stock price of his public companies.
Musk never agreed to an interview with Gibney. Instead, the director’s team researched every public comment Musk ever made and created a simulated Elon Musk who appears throughout the film.
I spoke with Gibney earlier this month about his experience making the film, why he decided to make his simulated Elon attractive, and what material he had to leave on the cutting room floor.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ZOË SCHIFFER: Alex Gibney, thank you so much for being with us today.
ALEX GIBNEY: Good to see you, Zoë.
This shouldn’t spoil anything, but in the four years that you spent making Musk, Elon Musk never agreed to sit down with you for an interview. Instead, your team looked back through the archives of everything he has said publicly, and you put together a sort of simulated interview, which appears throughout the film as a through line. Basically, it plays into Musk’s idea that we are all, in fact, living in a simulation. How did you decide on this approach for the film?
Well, what were we gonna do? He’s the main character.
I actually thought because he’d been so outspoken about this idea of a simulation, that cinematically we should lean into that. We should play in Elon’s sandbox and have a simulated interview. As we began to develop that idea, by using his real words, his actual audio recordings, but placing them in a kind of avatar which we would design, I think there became all sorts of thematic reasons to do it.
One was because he himself had said we’re living in a simulation. But two was the importance of this notion in the Elon Musk story of the shifting sands between what is real and what is unreal. Then also, because a lot of the film deals with his issues of AI, that discomfiting relationship that we’re beginning to explore, all of us on planet Earth, with these AI LLMs and how we begin to project things on these computer interfaces, it felt like this might be something interesting to do.
By the way, you’ll notice that when Elon is talking to people in a normal interview situation, he rarely looks at the interviewer or at the camera. He’s always looking this way or that way. So we designed this in a very different way, where he’s looking right down the barrel of the lens directly at the viewer, and we thought that that would be OK. We’re gonna give Elon a break, and actually, I thought our avatar made him look pretty good compared to some of the recent images of him.
I have a question about that because your simulated Elon Musk—I think it’s fair to say—looks a lot hunkier than present day Elon Musk. He’s kind of chiseled and tan, and …
It is kind of a two-day growth of beard.
Exactly. Was that an intentional choice? And if so, can you just talk about why that was?
It was. I joke about this, but he’s the star of my movie, I want my star to look good. But I think also it would’ve been a mistake to go into slop AI territory, like some of the images that Elon’s fans are posting about me right now, to sort of denigrate him visually.
Also, to some extent, the story is also about image building, too. So I thought, “OK, let’s have some fun with that as well.” Because we had a lot of choices. I mean, we started out with the design firm, like how should he look? What should he be dressed in? You know, we put him in a gamer chair, a leather jacket. There were conscious choices.
That extends to some of the comments he makes, where I don’t find like the most bumbling comments that Elon ever made.
When we have somebody speaking about something, I want a rejoinder from Elon. We looked for the best rejoinders, like how can he come back at us? Now, later on in the film, his statements become more and more fantastical, but that also is part of what happens.
I think it really worked for the film. I’ve seen it a couple times and I think there are these famous images of Elon Musk. I’m thinking of the one where he’s on the yacht and he’s shirtless. There, it seems like if you had leaned into a less flattering image, you would’ve been playing on his turf, but in a way that would undermine the message of the movie. Whereas elevating his look allowed you to hold him quite accountable in a way that comes across pretty fair.
Yeah, we were respectful. We gave him a good look. And much better by the time we go to the archive, particularly the archive of the SpaceX IPO, when he’s begun to start looking like Kim Jong Il.
I’m curious about your thoughts on ethics. It’s not putting words in someone’s mouth, because these are all statements that Elon Musk has really made, and it’s not even like you’re particularly mashing stuff together.
But your decision, for example, to have him look right at the camera, you are making decisions for him in a way that you couldn’t with a live interview subject. So I’m just curious if you could speak to the ethical implications of that.
I think that goes to the heart of what’s different about a documentary like this and maybe a podcast interview in the sense that we’re rendering that image in a kind of broader cinematic context. The imagery itself is intended to either convey meaning or to raise questions for the viewer that they should start to think about.
As you know from being interviewed for the film, we interviewed you in front of a green screen and then placed you in a background, which we sort of reveal at different times in the movie. All of this had to do with this kind of strange unreality, real unreal world we’re living in right now.
Mm-hmm.
But also by shooting him looking into the lens I sometimes do that and I sometimes don’t. There is this interesting psychological relationship that you begin to have with a subject that I think is both real and unreal at the same time, which was part of this larger conceit in terms of trying to find a way to make the movie and the formal devices in the film itself reflect some of the thematic concerns.
Right. It also makes him feel like there is a fair amount of conviction behind what he’s saying, and there’s this relationship between him and the audience.
I feel like over the course of his public life, he doesn’t appear to have had an allegiance or ideology to one coherent political identity or to even his colleagues or close friends. These things are shifting and changing. So I am curious how that kind of came up for you in the making of the film of wanting to convey an Elon Musk in the simulated interview that represented, to the best of your ability, the quote-unquote, “true Elon.”
I mean, it’s a shape-shifting image and one which is, after all, confected, which is useful, particularly when you’re using it as a vehicle to put these statements in. I agree with your point that you just made about Elon’s ideology. I think there are a lot of wise and very perceptive books that have been written that in my view sometimes make one kind of critical flaw. They try to render a coherence about Elon’s thinking that I’m not sure is there. I think he’s far more of an improviser and shape-shifter. He has an image of himself that he wants to convey, but he’ll sculpt and change that image according to conditions and evidence, like the way he acted with Obama versus the way he acted with Trump.
I mean, there was a history there, but still they’re both serving the same purpose for him, which is, “How do I cadge the most amount of resources out of the federal government?”
I’ve thought about this a fair amount as well. I think his acquisition of Twitter now acts as a very clear example where in the moment it was clearly this impulsive decision, but now that it’s become this big source of political power for him, there’s this tendency to be like, “Oh, he was playing a complicated game all along.”
My view has always been that if Elon has a superpower it’s that he has a pretty high risk tolerance, and so he’s able to make impulsive, rash decisions and then deal with the fallout in a way that a slightly more cautious person might not be able to, for better or often worse.
He’s so comfortable with risk. It’s as though he goes through life on a canoe moving down the rapids. When he sees a rock there, he goes this way. He sees another rock or a shifting current, he goes that way. In the case of Twitter, as you pointed out in your book, he kind of bought the company on a dare, and he grossly overpaid for it and also abandoned all due diligence.
From the standpoint of a businessman, it was just dumb. But he didn’t care, and he had so many resources, what did it matter? Twitter, now X, was always a vehicle for his ambitions and his ability to court retail investors.
I don’t think it occurred to him until later when he had virtually destroyed the value of the company for the rest of us, that actually this would be a good propaganda platform for me. That’s what it becomes. Then suddenly it actually has enormous political and economic utility in a way that I don’t think he thought through at the beginning.
So Musk aside, plenty of people did speak to you for this film: Musk’s first wife, Justine; his former girlfriend, the influencer Ashley St. Clair, who he has a kid with; his father; former business partners; former colleagues; people he’s fired; the former ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power; Kara Swisher.
Walk me through the process of getting these people to say yes, to trust you. Specifically, was there anyone who really surprised you in their immediate willingness to say yes, and anyone who really needed extra time and conversation with you in order to be able to say yes?
Almost everybody who appeared in this film needed time to be able to process and accept appearing, in part because there was a sense of risk associated with it. Only one person agreed immediately, and that was Errol Musk.
Oh my gosh.
It was almost like, what’s that line from that great film “You had me at …”
“You had me at ‘hello.’”
We had Errol Musk at hello. “Hello, Errol, would you like to appear in this documentary?” “Yes.” We quickly rushed a crew over to his house. I did a remote interview in South Africa. It was the one interview we did that was not green screen, and he was remarkably revealing, sometimes in intended and sometimes in unintended ways.
Everybody else took a lot of persuasion. I was having conversations with Justine for over a year, I think, before she agreed to sit down. Even somebody as powerful as Reid Hoffman, same thing. So it was very difficult to get people to appear because Musk’s—the risk profile for talking about Musk in a way that was honest was high.
In some cases I did talk to a lot of people, sort of powerful people in Silicon Valley, on background—some of whom had fond feelings toward Elon and some who didn’t. I found it interesting that there’s sort of like talking to people in a gentleman’s club, and one doesn’t talk about other people publicly.
While I did learn things when they were talking to me on background or off the record, I found that kind of revolting in a way. It’s like we’re dealing with a figure now who has enormous sway over all of us, and isn’t it important to weigh in on that kind of public debate?
But that wasn’t the view that they had. In fact, there’s a guy I know who is friends with Elon and treasures his friendship with Elon, and I said, “Let’s have a conversation off the record. You know, tell me what’s great about Elon and why you like him so much.” He said “I would never betray a friend like that.”
I got that for my book as well. I don’t feel as surprised. I think if we were talking about six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years ago, like, yes. But these are similar people to those who are flying to Washington, DC to pay fealty to Trump, and going directly against values that they were talking about not that long ago.
That’s right.
I do wanna talk about Errol Musk because you brought him up. There’s this very powerful interview in the film where he talks about his son. He seems to have had a very big impact on Elon Musk’s life, and not necessarily a positive one. This was kind of the central thesis of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk.
It kind of came down to daddy issues. So I’m curious to get your perspective on Errol’s influence on Elon and how you balanced showing the hardship of his childhood without using that as an overly simplistic explanation for his behavior today.
I think that’s an important point. I do think that Errol Musk had a powerful impact on Elon, because of how Elon felt he was treated by his dad, sometimes cruelly, psychologically. We don’t know of any kind of physical abuse. But also I think, you know, by watching Errol, you grok—to use a term from the Heinlein book—the notion that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
There’s an element you can see the character of Elon. We kept it in a kind of short contained section and as an element of how we can think about Elon Musk. But I think the Walter Isaacson conclusion, in a way, is a little bit too easy. There are a lot of people who’ve been bullied or abused by their parents who don’t end up becoming bullies or abusers.
And to say it’s a kind of a mechanical thing that happens is kind of letting Elon Musk off the moral hook. That was an issue I had with Walter’s book. To some extent, we’re all grateful for the fact that he was able to spend so much time with Elon. There’s an accretion of detail in the book that’s valuable.
But I think the conclusions were sort of a get out of jail free card for the performative cruelty that ultimately he engaged in. Yet you need to know about the origin story without—it can be an explanation without being an excuse, I guess is what I would say.
I would imagine that in the making of a film like this, there is an open question at the beginning in particular about whether you’re actually going to get enough access for this to work. It’s certainly a question with features that we write. I’m curious if there was a particular interview, maybe with someone close to him, where you knew like, “OK, we’re, we’re gonna be able to do this. I think we’re gonna have enough.”
Well, weirdly, it didn’t happen until very late, and I would say it was the Justine Musk interview. I mean, the Ashley St. Clair interview is powerful as it is, and it is powerful, and it gives you a front-row seat to the election of 2024. The Justine Musk interview gave me insights into his personality that were very powerful in both understanding him as a person, but also understanding some of what he did thematically.
Because I asked her—and this answer is not in the film, but it helped to guide me—“What was it that attracted you about him back in college?” They met in college in Canada. And she said it was his enormous confidence. And then the other thing she said that’s powerful that is in the film is that she learned about gaslighting from Elon Musk.
That gaslighting thing, the idea of trying to convince somebody that the truth is other than what it is, and to suggest that you’re crazy and if you don’t go along, is a super important insight into who Elon is. And confidence, of course, is what allows that to happen.
Justine’s was such a powerful interview in the film. There are multiple moments where she cries or is near tears. She comes across as just so genuine, and I think she also seems like someone who doesn’t appear to be in it for attention or power or money. Like, there’s a point in the film where I think she says, “I really wanted to have a say in how this story was told.”
I’m thinking specifically of when their first child died in a SIDS-related incident, and Elon Musk tweets that he was holding the child. The child died in his arms. And Justine says, “No, this was one of the most defining moments of my life. He died in my arms.” You really just see how Elon has hurt her over the years.
That’s right. That gets me kind of emotionally worked up even as I think about it, because of course that moment was deeply painful for Elon, which is what Walter Isaacson spent some time on in the book. But to credit-grab in the midst of a tragedy like that seems so petulant and small and, you know, talk about main character syndrome.
One of the defining things about Elon Musk is that over time, as he increased more and more power, there was only one character in all his companies, and that’s Elon Musk, and only one character in all of his marriages. That’s Elon Musk. Everyone else recedes into the background. It’s interesting.
Justine is a storyteller. She’s a talented novelist. I went deep into reading her blogs and also the article that she wrote for Marie Claire. You know, her ability to be a storyteller is actually quite profound precisely because she’s reaching for a deeper truth.
I think when Elon is a storyteller, he’s actually reaching for fiction. He’s reaching to mythologize in a way that undoes the truth, that steers us away from that kind of hard work of getting to the stuff that is really deep and painful because it’s true.
I am curious about your take on this because it’s a question that I have had about Elon Musk: Does he actually believe what he’s saying or is he knowingly lying?
I think it’s closer to the former, and I’ve dealt with a number of characters who are like this. Sam Harris in the film makes a distinction between liars and bullshitters, and liars, of course, have to assiduously keep track of the truth in order to know when and how they’re lying.
Bullshitters just say what comes to their mind. It’s a kind of—it’s on the right track, but sort of insufficient. I think for somebody like Elon Musk—or people in the past like that I’ve dealt with, like Elizabeth Holmes or the guys at Enron or even somebody like Lance Armstrong—in the moment, because you feel a kind of righteousness about your cause, you feel you’re kind of entitled to make things up, You feel over time so entitled and so corrupted by this notion that the end justifies the means, that some kind of psychological trick is played inside your own mind where in order to be forceful and confident about what it is you’re saying in the moment, you have to believe it.
I reckoned with that with Lance Armstrong, where he could look people in the eye at a press conference and say with great force, “How dare you say that I, as a cancer survivor, would ever use performance-enhancing drugs?” And then he’d get down off the podium and do a bag of blood.
But I think in the moment he did believe what he said, because that’s how you come off as being effective. You see it particularly for people who become kind of addicted to a growing power that they have, and they see that also they have an ability to convince, like Elizabeth Holmes did.
It’s a psychological quirk that kind of takes over, and it’s peculiar, but I think it’s real.
It’s so hard to remember when talking about Elon Musk that this goober in an Occupy Mars T-shirt who’s thrashing around with a chainsaw waxing poetic has had this undeniable impact on so many people’s lives and livelihoods, and a lot of that impact has been negative.
The part of your film about DOGE, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which is a short-lived stint in Washington, DC where he fired, I think, 300,000 federal workers to, quote-unquote, “solve the federal deficit.” Spoiler alert, he didn’t even come close. That was probably one of the hardest moments to watch.
Samantha Power, former ambassador to the UN, spoke specifically about the lives lost, thousands and thousands, and millions more projected, after he shuttered USAID. I’m curious, given all you know about Elon Musk at this point, and the reporting you did on DOGE, what do you think that period and that experiment was really about for him?
It wasn’t about waste, fraud, and abuse. There was an aspect of glee and performative cruelty that we tried to represent in the film by showing the DOGE cuts as a kind of first-person shooter game, juxtaposed of course, with the sober testimony of Samantha Power, who talks about how many children died as a result.
But I think in many ways the waste, fraud, and abuse was kind of the magician’s sleight of hand to say, “This is what we’re doing.” But what he was really doing was something very self-serving, which as a big tech baron, was literally destroying the regulatory state.
If there was a lot of collateral damage, people died, disease went up, who cared? It was the destruction of the inspectors general, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He called everything corrupt without any evidence and so forth and so on.
The other thing, and the more controversial thing, which we’re all still chasing in a way, is the fact that the DOGE boys, who were clueless about the agencies they went into, nevertheless seemed to know an awful lot about data extraction and data access.
And they were granted, according to one head of IT at a federal agency I talked to, super admin status, which you know better than I, allows them to break through all sorts of silos that are intended to be erected to either protect classified information or protect our private data.
So the DOGE boys had access to vast amounts of data that no one has ever had access to in history. All of that didn’t go unnoticed, but it was the flash over the chainsaw all of the press conferences kind of hid a lot of what was really going on, I think.
Yeah, if you’re really worried about waste, fraud, and abuse, then there’s a certain level of care that you would take in your auditing. The DOGE boys were posting on X this kind of, quote-unquote, “wall of receipts” where they would talk about contracts that they’ve slashed, not understanding that in procurement paperwork, oftentimes you’ll put the total lifetime amount that could ever be spent on a contract, which is sometimes quite different, millions of dollars different, from the actual amount that was spent.
So they were claiming savings that were nowhere close to what had actually been saved. There was another, and this is in the film as well, moment where Elon Musk was talking about how they were finding tons of people who were getting Social Security benefits who were 150 years old, not understanding that when you don’t have a birthday for someone in the Social Security system, which is built on very arcane technology, really old code, it defaults to a birthday that shows someone as 150.
Anyone who had worked in SSA would’ve been able to tell them that, but they didn’t seem, to me, to be particularly interested in the details, which again, if you’re really worried about waste, fraud, and abuse, that’s all about details.
Correct. And indeed the detail that you mentioned about Social Security was actually posted on the Social Security website. So they could’ve read the website. But it goes to this kind of performative cruelty where it almost didn’t matter to them, you know?
One of the more chilling interviews, which I got from a deposition, was with one of the DOGE boys, a kid named Nate Cavanaugh.
Mm-hmm.
The questioner asked him, “Did you not care about the lives that were being affected by all of these mass firings and, and the kind of pain and suffering that would cause?” And he said, “Well, no, because we thought it was more important to reduce the federal deficit.” Next question: “Did you reduce the federal deficit?” “No.” But, you know, for a guy who’s supposed to be such a genius, you would think there would be some analysis done.
But that parallels what happened at Twitter, as you know better than anybody. In other words, they would fire people at Twitter who had actually critical jobs, without even knowing what they did.
Ezra Klein has talked about this. I think it’s really true. Like at Twitter, when you make a rash decision or you fire people, the feedback loop with the company or social media is pretty small. You can see the effects of that pretty quickly. The site starts to get glitchy.
In government, the feedback loop is really long. You don’t get to see immediately the impact of those decisions, and to me that appears to be a large reason why the effects were just so much more devastating, and honestly, while he has admitted publicly DOGE was a failure, it seems like there was no move made to kind of correct any errors.
I think even as a failure, it was sort of an intended failure in the sense that it was an attempt to really fire cannons at the government, particularly the regulatory state, so that the castle couldn’t be repaired.
Yeah, I guess I should say the stated goal of the budget deficit was a failure, but the implicit goal was quite successful.
That’s right. It was really successful. The other thing that is so disturbing about the DOGE moment is that in a lot of cases they were literally warned about the damage that was done, and that, that was certainly the case at USAID. You can make a decision as a country that we’re not gonna give aid to developing countries anymore, but money had already been appropriated by Congress. Indeed, food had been bought to send to starving children, and in some cases, boats were literally stopped to prevent that food from going to the children, who then subsequently died while they ended up burning the food on pallets someplace, literally wasting food that had already been bought and paid for.
So the cruelty had a kind of performative quality to it, which was meant, I think, to speak to the roiling anger that Musk is so good at fomenting on X and which the MAGA movement is so good at exploiting politically.
Toward the end of the film, Geoffrey Hinton comes on and says, quote, “It’s fairly clear to me Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections. If you want to corrupt those midterm elections and you want to use AI, what you’d need to do is get detailed information on US citizens. And what DOGE did looked to me like just what you would do if you wanted to get data on US citizens.”
Basically, he’s saying Musk appears to have already gathered up the data Trump would need to meddle in the upcoming election. We’re now less than a month out. So based on the interviews that you conducted and the information that you have coming out of this project, I’m curious what you are most worried about, and what is the concern in terms of what Musk may have been cooking up, and how do you see this playing out?
The first thing I should say is I don’t really know.
You guys are doing a lot of interesting reporting now about where the money is going and how much of it is going to focus on negative advertising versus pro-candidate stuff. But also, what kind of stories are people particularly susceptible to? We know from years of having our data mined by Facebook and X and others that it’s really useful to know what people respond to and what people think, and you have enormous data about them, then you can message certain things in order to be able to reach those soft points psychologically.
I would have to say at this moment, because it does look like we’re not far away from the election, and it looks like it’s gonna be a blue wave. We’ll see. But if it is, my bigger concern is over a disinformation campaign, aided and abetted by Elon Musk, with massive amounts of data that would try to undermine people’s confidence that the election was free and fair.
That’s what I fear most at this moment.
The documentary comes in at just under four hours.
Three hours, 45 minutes, but there’s a 10-minute intermission.
OK. The documentary comes in just under four hours, but I know from talking to you and being a little bit involved in the project that there was a ton that you left on the cutting room floor. So I’m wondering if you can speak about what parts you had to cut that were the hardest, what you wish you could’ve kept in, and how you ultimately made those decisions.
There are sections that I wish I could have kept at their expanded length. One of them is Twitter, where we had a lot more detail about the chaos of Twitter. DOGE also. There were a lot of things I would’ve liked to have expanded rather than have to condense to their essence.
The SolarCity story was one that we left out, which was a really interesting story. There was a Russian influence story that was quite powerful, though we never got to a kernel that would indicate exactly the dimensions of it.
There was a counterintelligence investigation, the whole SEC thing about the tweets, and then we got an incredible deposition. I love depositions. They show so much about people sometimes, particularly people in power who are being held to account in a deposition.
So there was a lot of wonderful detail that was left on the cutting room floor. Maybe someday for all of us geeks, we’ll release it.
We’ll get the six-hour cut.
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