{"id":609709,"date":"2026-09-08T15:06:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T15:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/609709\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T15:06:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T15:06:10","slug":"state-handouts-10000-lasers-and-trumps-election-six-things-we-learned-from-the-elon-musk-film-venice-film-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/609709\/","title":{"rendered":"State handouts, 10,000 lasers \u2013 and Trump\u2019s election: six things we learned from the Elon Musk film | Venice film festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

Veteran documentarian Alex Gibney\u2019s film about the richest broligarch on the planet<\/a> has been one of the most eagerly anticipated films at the Venice film festival this year. The Oscar-winning 72-year-old, who has in previous films taken on the US military, the Catholic church, Vladimir Putin and Scientology, has been investigating the tech tycoon\u2019s ascent and speaking to people in his orbit since late 2022, before his Maga turn and Trump 2.0.<\/p>\n

The result clocks in at just under four hours and presents a comprehensive answer to how on earth one man managed to amass so much money and political influence. It is shocking less for any individual new pieces of information Gibney has unearthed than for its totality. Here are six things the film tells us:<\/p>\n

Musk is a genius \u2013 at tricking the government into giving him assistance<\/p>\n

At Maga rallies, Musk has been introduced as \u201cAmerica\u2019s biggest capitalist\u201d, but Gibney reminds us that he\u2019s always been more than happy to go begging to the state for handouts \u2013 such as by cosying up to Obama to gain government contracts for SpaceX to launch satellites for Nasa and the military. The film zooms in on a Tesla press event in June 2013, where Musk unveiled a new \u201cbattery swap\u201d system that promised to remove and replace the drained battery pack of a Model S with a fully charged one in just 90 seconds. As it turns out, the technology was never rolled out, and interviewees tell Gibney that a demonstration site at Harris Ranch was barely used for the process. Instead, the film-maker suggests that Musk\u2019s over-promise allowed Tesla to get more ZEV credits from the Californian government, which are awarded to electric car makers based on range and which Musk could then sell to more polluting manufacturers.<\/p>\n

In spite of everything, there was something admirable about Musk once<\/p>\n

Gibney\u2019s film serves as a reminder that Musk has never been in possession of charm or charisma \u2013 the petulant perma-poster retweeting praise is not far from the self-regarding twentysomething start-up bro. But what he did with the funds he earned from selling shares of his first software companies, Zip2, X.com and PayPal, was unusual, Gibney concedes. Where others turned to venture capital, Musk turned to engineering. It\u2019s partially an act, we learn from his ex-wife Justine when she recalls how self-consciously he picked his wardrobe, telling her \u201cI can\u2019t look cool or hip, because I need to look like an engineer\u201d. But in footage of Musk biting his nails with fellow engineers during SpaceX rocket launches his enthusiasm and emotional investment is genuine, and at times infectious.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s procreation drive is motivated by a fear of civilisational breakdown<\/p>\n

Musk has 14 publicly known children, and sources tell Gibney that there are probably more. Some of them were conceived in romantic relationships but more recently the circumstances of their birth seem to have been entirely transactional, via sperm donations to employees of his companies. In a text message to one of his ex-partners, influencer Ashley St Clair, Musk said his desire to have \u201ca legion of children\u201d was driven by a fear of \u201ccivil war\u201d. The documentary mostly places the roots of that fear in his South African childhood (in one scene, his father Errol Musk talks with no visible remorse of shooting three intruders in their home). \u201cIt\u2019s no doubt he had a traumatic childhood,\u201d Gibney said at a press conference in Venice. \u201cHe\u2019s now playing out the trauma on the rest of us.\u201d But, oddly for a man who was long a prominent atheist, the film also hints at a religious dimension to his vision of the apocalypse. The sordid business of negotiating disbursements and NDAs with the mothers of Musk\u2019s children are handled by his right-hand man Jared Birchall, a devout Mormon whom St Clair calls his \u201chenchman\u201d and \u201cdemon\u201d.<\/p>\n

To Musk, empathy is good in principle but not in action<\/p>\n

Recently, Musk has held forth at length about his view that \u201csuicidal empathy\u201d \u2013 people who have more empathy for criminals than the victims of criminals, in his view \u2013 is behind the decline of western civilisation. Empathy isn\u2019t bad, he says in the doc, it\u2019s just that it\u2019s become too shallow. But interviews in the film raise the question of whether Musk is capable of empathy at all. This is a man who tells his wife that \u201cif you were my employee, I would fire you\u201d, and urges her to tell his estranged trans-daughter Jenna that \u201cI\u2019ll always love her\u201d \u2013 and then cuts off her health insurance the next day.<\/p>\n

Musk knew with a disconcerting degree of certainty that Trump would re-elected<\/p>\n

In the film, St Clair describes the events of Trump\u2019s election in November 2024. Musk, she tells Gibney, had a \u201cdegree of certainty\u201d about the results before they came in that \u201cI had never seen before\u201d. He told her that he would \u201cunleash the anomaly in the matrix\u201d and that \u201cwe have 10,000 lasers in space\u201d. Gibney leaves that comment hanging.<\/p>\n

The godfather of AI is worried Musk might rig the next election<\/p>\n

Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning British-Canadian computer scientist known as the \u201cgodfather of AI\u201d, used to be friendly with Musk, but the pair fell out after Hinton declined his offer to join the xAI board. In the film, he makes clear that he does not trust Musk to weigh up the risks and benefits of AI responsibly, and there\u2019s more. \u201cIt\u2019s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,\u201d Hinton says onscreen. \u201cIf you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on US citizens. And what Doge did looked like just what you would do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Veteran documentarian Alex Gibney\u2019s film about the richest broligarch on the planet has been one of the most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":609710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-609709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=609709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/609710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}