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.
Lawsuit threat
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.
St. 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. All we do is to show that he was bragging to his lover that he had special access to understanding the outcome of the election in a way that other people didn't," Gibney told NPR. "Was he lying to her or was he just bragging or was he telling us something that we shouldn't know? I don't know. That's for the viewer to decide."
Gibney, who's 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 that we did. I actually hired an independent fact checker to check our own fact checkers inside. So against the richest man, the truth is not always a defense, but I'm counting on his commitment to the principles of being a free speech absolutist."
Gibney also noted that a lawsuit would also trigger a discovery process by which he could subpoena Musk's internal documents.
Overselling products?
As he took a closer look at SpaceX and Tesla, Gibney noticed that while the two companies "had achieved great things technologically... their stock price was way out of proportion to their actual economic value." The filmmaker says Musk achieved this by overselling his products.
SpaceX performed a vital service, ferrying equipment into space… developing rockets that could be reused cheaply.
But the film says Musk cast the company as an even grander venture, forever about to colonize Mars.
Tesla made popular electric cars, but the film says Musk oversold them as self-driving.
According to the film, they weren't made with enough sensors for that, which is why some have crashed. "That's a level of overpromising that leans into fraud," Gibney said.
NPR has reached out to Spiro, Musk's attorney, about the specific claims made in the film but has not heard back.
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Kaity Kline.
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