Gibney has chronicled tech leaders including Elizabeth Holmes and Steve Jobs. But this film has generated perhaps more news and controversy ahead of its release than any of his previous documentaries, in large part because of how strongly Musk and other tech companies have reacted to it.
On Sept. 30, Gibney sat down with TIME in Washington, D.C. to discuss why the movie is so critical of Musk, and Gibney’s ongoing fight to distribute it widely. Here are excerpts from the conversation, which has been condensed for clarity.
Gibney: It's certainly critical, but I think the criticism is earned. This is a rigorous and meticulous investigation of somebody, and it ends up being critical.
Yes. That's right.
They're really high. Look at all of these tech leaders in Washington, talking about the future of AI. The takeaway seems to be, “We'll just take care of it.”
Musk just landed a new gig: co-leading Project Meridian, a new Pentagon initiative aimed at shaping the future of warfare.
You’ve made several docs about Silicon Valley figures, including Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Holmes. In which ways is Musk simply channeling Silicon Valley mythmaking, and in which ways is he distinct?
I do think, in the “fake it till you make it” sense, that he's straight out of the Silicon Valley mold and similar to Elizabeth Holmes in that way. The obvious difference between him and Elizabeth Holmes is you can drive a Tesla, and the Edison [Theranos’s blood-testing machine] never worked. It’s not worth what its valuation is, but there’s a real car.
Yeah, these are real companies with very impressive technology. Seeing those reusable rockets come down—it's really impressive.
Lori Garver [former NASA administrator] tells a very different story. The federal government had decided to use him as a test case, and they were going to keep working with him whether that fourth launch went up or not. We're supposed to invest in the lone entrepreneur who gets by without any government help or assistance. Turns out, it's just the opposite. The government has always been his friend—it made SpaceX, it made Tesla profitable at critical moments.
He threatened to sue over a movie that he hadn't even seen, which made it very much like the Church of Scientology.
But I'd be a fool not to be concerned about Elon Musk, both because he's the richest man in the world and also because he has the ear of a president who has turned the Department of Justice into an instrument of revenge.
There was somebody, actually, in Camden, Maine. I thought somebody from behind me was following me, and the person in the passenger seat had an iPhone up, photographing me. But what did Hunter Thompson used to say? “Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean I don't have enemies.” [Thompson was famously paranoid, but the line is actually from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.]
I don't get discouraged over the fact that Elon has a microphone, because I think Twitter has become this kind of dumpster fire which houses a collection of cult followers for him, as well as some critics, in order to boost engagement.
Thankfully, to some extent, there is a cyclical nature to this, because I remember when I did a film called The Trials of Henry Kissinger, no cable network would show it in this country until we put it out in theaters. It played for months at Film Forum, and then started playing around the country. And then there was such public demand for it that finally the network put it on.
Which of those social media platforms has backed down from blocking the trailer?
What does this whole kerfuffle tell us about the status of free speech?
One of the most controversial parts of the film is when Ashley St. Clair, Musk’s ex, says that before the 2024 presidential election, Musk texted her about feeling optimistic about Trump winning because of Musk’s “10,000 lasers in space.” What does that text mean, and what do you hope comes of it being in the movie?
And it pays off a little bit later in the film, when we begin to wonder what happened to all of the data that DOGE had access to, and did it end up in Elon's hands? And is he going to use it for the 2026 elections? We don't know.
As Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, says: if you were to train an AI on all the data of every American citizen, you'd have some powerful tools. Either to figure out how or where to devote resources during the election, or develop rhetorical strategies to appeal to people. We know how good Facebook and Instagram are at getting right to what we want, right? So, it's just disquieting on its face.
I think the idea is that, particularly with what Elon Musk is doing with AI: what does AI want more than anything else? Data. And that is a vast amount of data to feed to an AI system.
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