Alex Gibney’s “Musk” documentary, out in theaters nationwide next week, has already been grabbing headlines for the alarming texts its billionaire subject once sent to a romantic partner, former right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair.
St. Clair, who participated in the film, revealed that Elon Musk told her shortly before Election Day 2024 that he was feeling “optimistic” because “tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.”
Asked what he meant, Musk pointed to “lasers from space,” saying, “I have over 10,000 lasers in space right now.”
Was Musk interfering in the 2024 election? Gibney has been careful to note that he cannot say whether Musk was bragging to a romantic partner or lying. At a Friday screening of the new film, the director said the texts to St. Clair seemed like a pretty important detail to include. He also shared his theory about what Musk was actually talking about.
“If I was to hazard a guess,” Gibney said, “it had to do with not the switching of votes, but with the reporting of votes, and that he knew sooner than anybody else did because, you know, out of the voting systems, there are things that appear on the internet, and if you know how to hack into them, you can get real-time data.”
“So if I was to hazard a guess, that would be it.”
Other questions the film leaves unanswered are even more unsettling, including whether Musk had private reasons for his involvement in President Donald Trump’s much-ballyhooed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Elon Musk appears at the 2009 North American Auto Show.
James Leynse/Corbis via Getty Images
“Musk” walks viewers through the evolution of an ambitious businessman whose success grew out of his legitimate ability to speak the languages of both engineering and management as the head of electric car maker Tesla, rocket launcher SpaceX and other high-tech endeavors.
A hyperrealistic deepfake Musk — albeit with a cartoonishly enlarged head — addresses viewers at many points throughout the film, delivering lines in what appears to be Musk’s own voice. The fake Musk then racks up points as he takes aim at bigger and bigger targets in the first-person shooter game that is his own life, eventually culminating in his rampage through the U.S. government.
Gibney spends most of his time on Musk’s penchant for overselling his products, particularly Tesla’s self-driving function, which has led to a bevy of accidents and lawsuits. The film also says Tesla vehicles lie to their owners, hiding actual driving-range estimates and other information.
But it also takes time to discuss Musk’s pro-natalist views and the array of women who have borne his children — or “breeders,” as ex-wife Justine Musk alleges someone “on Elon’s side” once called the women. Gibney introduces viewers to Errol Musk, the billionaire’s father, who tells a bizarre tale about his son’s non-reaction to seeing a family friend collapse and die in front of him, choosing instead to read a comic book. Musk’s hard-right political turn appears to accelerate around the time of the coronavirus pandemic.
Its four-hour runtime may sound like a slog, but there is more than enough material in “Musk” to fill it out — to the extent that Gibney could leave out such bizarre controversies as Musk’s involvement in the Thai cave rescue and such humiliating anecdotes as the time Musk reportedly wrecked his $1 million McLaren with Peter Thiel in the passenger seat.
In the film, Musk is both an eccentric who has made a real impact in science and technology and a deeply flawed human being who longs to be admired as he amasses power and influence through extremely questionable means. He is truly gifted at pumping up his companies’ stock prices.
By the end, Gibney leaves viewers wondering how far Musk will go to get his way: Could he, for instance, use artificial intelligence to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections?
Musk, of course, operates the artificial intelligence company xAI and its chatbot, Grok, which was integrated into Pentagon systems this year.
Elon Musk watches the liftoff of Falcon1 rocket from Omelek Island in the Kwajalein Atoll, 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii, in September 2008. Falcon 1 was the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit Earth.
Axel Koester via Getty Images
Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI,” says in the documentary that it seems “clear” to him that Trump, for one, is “hell-bent” on disrupting the midterms.
Musk and Trump have made nice following their blowup over Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” which increased the federal deficit even as Musk was tasked with decreasing it, as the documentary points out.
It also takes time to mull over the capabilities of DOGE staffers — a team of young men who capped out at around age 25 and did not seem to be interested in spending time learning about the vast systems of government they were tasked with streamlining, ostensibly to combat “waste, fraud and abuse” of federal tax dollars.
DOGE ended up erratically swinging an axe at the federal workforce, halting critical scientific research, slashing the National Weather Service, and dismantling USAID, leaving rations that could have fed 3.5 million people to rot in storage.
After Friday’s screening, Gibney pointed out it was “discomforting” that “one of the things we know about DOGE is that these kids knew next to nothing about the agencies they went into.”
“But they knew a lot about how to access data. And within a day or two of entering those agencies, they had what’s called ‘super admin’ status, and they could access data across these silos that contain classified information, that contain all sorts of personal information about us. And that’s never happened before, to have that kind of breadth of access across the federal government,” Gibney said.
Elon Musk jumps on the stage behind Donald Trump at a second rally in Butler, Pennsylvania shortly before the 2024 election.
Evan Vucci via Associated Press
Reporters have documented DOGE’s smash-and-grab approach, and whistleblowers have flagged it along the way. But privacy advocates have long fretted that a superdatabase of information from discrete federal agencies could fall into the wrong hands.
“One troubling aspect of the DOGE tenure,” executive producer Ronan Farrow said Friday, “is there are genuinely unanswered questions about what happened to the private, sensitive data of Americans — Social Security numbers, phone numbers, addresses, the list goes on and on. This is the kind of information that was harvested, exfiltrated, given to a third party, and we do not know exactly what became of it from there, or who all the players were involved.”
“Now, this is the kind of information that can be very sensitive in many ways, but one of them is from an electoral standpoint,” Farrow said.
Elon Musk reacts after being awarded a National Medal of Science during the President Donald Trump’s “Golden Age of American Innovation Summit” last week.
Win McNamee via Getty Images
“There’s a kind of harmony … toward the end of the film, with the data that they access from DOGE,” Gibney said, adding, “which may indeed be, you know, training data for AI to interfere with the midterm elections we’re about to engage in.”
HuffPost has reached out to an attorney for Musk for comment.
In the film, St. Clair voices her own questions.
“What is Elon building? What are his goals?” she asks.
At another point, she makes a blunt statement: “Elon is a nuke.”
Musk has been putting up a fight over the film, barring “Musk” ads from appearing on X and pressuring other social platforms including Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram from showing them, too. (Gibney said Friday that the ads were blocked because they supposedly fell into the category of “political advertising.”)
He engaged in name-calling with Gibney on X, saying the director “is a douchebag to his core” with a “bias” against him.
“Musk” is set to stream in January on HBO, the network which just became part of the Ellison family’s media empire. The Ellisons, who are allied with Trump. Trump, who has made nice with Musk.
Asked about the odds of his film actually hitting HBO, Gibney shrugged.
“We’ll see,” he said.