‘Musk’ Director Alex Gibney On World’s Richest Man: “He’s A Bullsh*tter”

When the world’s richest man threatens to sue you, it’s enough to get your attention.

That’s the situation filmmaker Alex Gibney finds himself in with the imminent release of his documentary Musk, an unflattering portrait of tech mogul and investor Elon Musk.

“He is well funded,” Gibney notes in conversation with Deadline. “Let’s just be honest for a moment and say that with our legal system, money talks in court in a way that it shouldn’t. It’s not like everyone is equal under the law. He’s got a bucketload of money — more money, on paper, than anybody on the planet.”

Through his attorney Alex Spiro, Musk raised the prospect of a defamation suit over part of the film relating to the 2024 presidential election. In that sequence, Musk’s former girlfriend, Ashley St. Clair, says Musk told her before election day that he would “unleash an anomaly in the matrix” to ensure his preferred candidate, Donald Trump, came out victorious.

“Is it a concern when braggadocious Alex Spiro fires a broadside and threatens to sue? Yeah, it’s always a concern,” Gibney admits. But he detects an upside.

“The danger of suing, as I discovered long ago when I did a film on Henry Kissinger,” Gibney observes, “is that you open yourself up to discovery.”

The discovery process would allow Gibney and his own legal team to dig into many of the darkest areas in the documentary – for instance, whether Musk exaggerated the autopilot capacity of Tesla vehicles, with fatal consequences. The film alleges Tesla hid data stored on a Tesla S model that ran through a T-intersection in Florida in 2019, killing a 22-year-old woman and it cites other examples where Teslas being driven on autopilot were involved in deadly accidents. And here’s another area ripe for exploration: how did Musk leverage the opportunity to run DOGE at the start of the second Trump administration?

“One of the things I’d want to pursue in discovery is… what about the data obtained from DOGE? — or should I say, did he obtain, did they take [data]? We know that the DOGE boys had access to all of our data,” Gibney comments. “So, the question is, is that data sitting on hard drives at SpaceX and what are they doing with it now? So, there’d be a lot of fun questions to ask in discovery.”

For the record, Gibney says the threat from Musk’s attorney to sue him is based on a faulty premise.

“What was interesting about that threat is that they cooked up something that we said when we didn’t say it. All we did was to show [Musk’s] texts to Ashley. He was the one who started talking about ‘lasers in space.’ He was the one who said there’s an ‘anomaly in the matrix,’” Gibney insists. “The film doesn’t say he did this to manipulate the election. The film shows that he was texting to his lover, suggesting to her that he manipulated the election. So, was he lying to her? Was he telling the truth? We don’t know. That’s why you put it in the movie and it’s up to the viewer to find out.”

We spoke with Gibney at the Camden International Film Festival in Maine, where he took the Musk documentary after its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival and world premiere in Venice. Bleecker Street opens the documentary theatrically in New York and Los Angeles on October 9 before expanding nationwide.

Shortly after the Venice premiere, Musk used his X/Twitter platform to attack the filmmaker, calling him a “horrible human” with “zero integrity,” adding for good measure that he’s a “bitter old man who lost the plot long ago.” But in the war of words, Gibney gives as good as he gets.

“He’s a bullshitter,” Gibney tells me over coffee, sitting in sunshine near the harbor in Rockland, ME. He says Musk has serially inflated his role at Tesla and SpaceX.

“He didn’t invent Tesla, he didn’t invent the technology, didn’t invent the business plan. He invented a mission and he invested. I mean, he was willing to roll in and invest all his money. Good for him. But it was the mission that attracted all of these talented engineers,” Gibney asserts. “It’s not like he sat there in a room and said, ‘The wheelbase will be this.’ He’s an investor and that’s his genius, is pumping the stock. But all these people say, ‘Elon this and Elon that.’ Elon didn’t launch every rocket [at SpaceX]. Once again, there’s a mission at that company that attracts a tremendous number of talented engineers… He’s the front man with the story that he’s responsible for everything.”

When I suggest Musk isn’t “under the hood with a wrench,” Gibney replies. “He’s not… He’s not working the rivet gun. It’s not like, ‘Oh, he worked the wrench on car number 759 and that really saved the operation.’ No… Honestly, he’s a storyteller. And in that sense, he sort of follows in the footsteps of [Steve] Jobs, but Jobs, unlike Musk, was really dedicated to making [Apple] products better. And I think the products at Tesla and SpaceX succeed despite him, not because of him.”

Our conversation at the Camden festival turned to another billionaire – well, former billionaire: Elizabeth Holmes. Gibney examined the rise and fall of the Theranos founder in his 2019 documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. A week after Musk hits theaters, a new documentary about Holmes opens theatrically – You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. That film created a sensation when it premiered as a super-secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival on September 5.

“I saw the teaser-trailer that dropped, and that’s the Holmes that I recognize from The Inventor,” Gibney notes. “It’s like there’s some figures that just generate a tremendous amount of interest and there are a bunch of different stories on it. Good. I feel like we did our thing and now Oppenheim and Fielder can do their thing… I’m going to watch it because she didn’t talk to us, right? I had to rely on her talking to [filmmaker] Errol Morris, all that material that I got, because it was all owned by Theranos. But I have a pretty good sense of who she is, and our producer talked to her.”

Holmes and her romantic partner and baby daddy Billy Evans granted full access to directors Fielder and Oppenheim in the weeks before she reported to federal prison to begin serving an 11-year sentence following her conviction for defrauding Theranos investors. It was a “nothing’s off the table” kind of offer – hence the film’s title, You Can See Everything. The couple’s goal seems to have been to publicize their intention to revive Theranos, the Silicon Valley startup built on the promise that it would revolutionize the lucrative blood testing industry through new technology.

“I’m excited to see it,” Gibney says. “It’s about a curious person who seems to be determined to perpetuate her fantasy no matter what the odds. And in that, I suppose, she shares certain characteristics with Elon Musk, but Musk has been much more effective at selling his dream. ‘Let me sell you a dream.’”

As far as Musk goes, Gibney says, “If I’m to be impressed by something he did, he’s kept a lot of this kind of Oz-like fiction about himself for a long time. And people still buy it. People go on Squawk Box all the time and say, ‘Oh yeah, his thing is going to be worth $125 trillion. Better buy.’”