Alex Gibney warns of Elon Musk's 'unchecked power' in new documentary

What are the odds that we are in base reality? Like we are in a simulation? Give it up for the greatest! Elon Musk is one of the most controversial figures in the world. So I decided to make him the subject of my next film. But it soon became clear, Elon would not participate. I'm curious from your perspective, as you reported on this, as you investigated this, how was your opinion on, I guess, the future of democracy, the future of the climate? climate, is it a warning or is it a funeral? It's not a funeral. It's a warning. But things are pretty dark. We're going to go into the, we're going to be lowered into the earth if we're not careful. You know, and the film ends with the planet earth exploding and Musk escaping on his spaceship. So that's about as pessimistic as it gets. But I think, you know, at the bottom of Pandora's box, there's always hope. You spoke about how we are all complicit in allowing this to have happened, I'm curious whether is that an esoteric examination or is that a literal finding that you do think that we all have guilt in the state that we arrived in but also specifically the power that Elon Musk has been able to accrue, we did, we let him take it because we didn't demand that our representatives hold him to account and we ended up buying the fiction that he was peddling, we let him gaslight us about what he was doing and you know you can be two things at the same time and that and human beings have a very hard time with that and I think part of the reason I make these films is to say look at these people look at who they are look at what they're doing and examine it carefully and check your own feelings about the matter, you know, oh I like my Tesla, so he must be a good guy. Well, you may like your Tesla but what if he's not a good guy, right? So um, two things can be true at the same time. He had told me I can't be president but I can help Trump beat Biden. They say I think we're gonna win, he said I have ten thousand lasers in space, I knew that hours ago. What are his actual motivations do we even know this man at all? One element of this film does incorporate allegations from one of your voices that there may have been something going on with the results of the election that saw Donald Trump enter back into office, I know that is one of the things that Musk has pointed at directly as being potentially fallacious when it comes to putting that into your film were there concerns, were there back and forth or was this something that you knew had enough backing to be included in your final project I should point out that the remarks about the anomaly in the matrix and lasers from space didn't come from a critic of Musk, didn't come from me, they came from Elon Musk himself so I put those words in the film because they seemed pointed if you have an election that took the turn that it did and you have Elon Musk tweeting about the fact that there was an anomaly of the anomaly in the matrix and that he was hinting that he was doing something to change the outcome. Well, that seems a legitimate thing to put in a film. I don't say in the film, that's what he did. I say that's what he said. I would say this, you know, Musk, as I tweeted to him on X, he's in it a lot. And I make sure that he has his say. And I make sure that what he has to say very much contradicts what other people in the film have to say and even what I have to say talking about giving his point of view of course one of the thematic constructs in this documentary is the AI reconstruction of Musk himself giving an interview which I understand is based on his actual words that he said at different times I use Musk's actual words actual recordings of his words and we house them in an avatar which is a It was a creation of myself and our visual effects firm MakeMake. And I mean, you just mentioned there was a lot of thought that went into the inclusion of this AI avatar. I wanted to ask directly though... I just want to push back a little bit. It's not, strictly speaking, an AI avatar, right? In other words, it's not like we press the button or ask the question and then AI, generative AI, mounts a subject. It was much more complicated than that. AI tools but they're being used by they're guided by human hands this contextualization I think speaks to my question because when it comes to documentary we are speaking about reality about the real world and as you're reframing this is reality real world I am also curious though whether there were reservations about maybe how people might misconstrue as maybe I'm doing react to the inclusion of something that at least evokes the idea I think the idea was to be an agent provocateur, to reckon with some of these themes visually, rather than just speak about them, but to really put them in the movie so that you're experiencing them. Films are experiences that are meant to evoke reactions that continue to take you deeper and deeper and deeper into the issues in the story. So that's why we invested in it. I know that this film is coming out a month ahead of the midterms. Is there a hope, a design, a theorization that this film could change the perception of how Americans think of their government and what they want to see happen when those votes happen? I do. I mean, you know, I think this film shows what happens when a reckless tech billionaire takes effectively control of the federal government and attempts to destroy it for personal aggrandizement and make himself more wealthy, and also to eliminate any consequences for his past actions, you know, because there's nobody at the Department of Justice or FBI in this administration that's looking to investigate Elon Musk. But also, you know, the film sounds a number of alarm bells about the 2026 midterms. Notably, it makes it clear that part of what Doge did in its purported attempts to uncover waste, fraud, and abuse was to gain access, total access, to virtually all the data that the federal government has on American citizens. I don't have any proof that Elon Musk took that data to SpaceX or to Tesla, but I think somebody should investigate whether he did, because they had access to it, and whether or not he's using it in some way to impact the 2026 elections. You know, I didn't set out to make a four-hour movie. In fact, we were very close to finishing a two-hour movie. And that's when Musk hitched his wagon to Trump. And then it was HBO who said, you know, we really need to expand the story. Not just, you know, ignore what you've already done, but to use it as a building block for a much more epic drama. And I feel like that's what we did. And that for this figure who has so much influence on the future of the planet, it deserves, it's deserving of that three hours and 45 minutes. But I should add, you know, I threw in some laughs and a lot of good music and some really intriguing characters that I hope people will be engaged by. Even as I sound a very serious alarm about what happens when you allow a man like Musk to have unchecked power. To have one person who's this chaotic and has this much power, it's completely insane.