State handouts, 10,000 lasers – and Trump’s election: six things we learned from the Elon Musk film
Veteran documentarian Alex Gibney’s film about the richest broligarch on the planet 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’s ascent and speaking to people in his orbit since late 2022, before his Maga turn and Trump 2.0.
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:
Musk is a genius – at tricking the government into giving him assistance
At Maga rallies, Musk has been introduced as “America’s biggest capitalist”, but Gibney reminds us that he’s always been more than happy to go begging to the state for handouts – 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 “battery swap” 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’s 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.
In spite of everything, there was something admirable about Musk once
Gibney’s film serves as a reminder that Musk has never been in possession of charm or charisma – 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’s partially an act, we learn from his ex-wife Justine when she recalls how self-consciously he picked his wardrobe, telling her “I can’t look cool or hip, because I need to look like an engineer”. 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.
Musk’s procreation drive is motivated by a fear of civilisational breakdown
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 “a legion of children” was driven by a fear of “civil war”. 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). “It’s no doubt he had a traumatic childhood,” Gibney said at a press conference in Venice. “He’s now playing out the trauma on the rest of us.” 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’s children are handled by his right-hand man Jared Birchall, a devout Mormon whom St Clair calls his “henchman” and “demon”.
To Musk, empathy is good in principle but not in action
Recently, Musk has held forth at length about his view that “suicidal empathy” – people who have more empathy for criminals than the victims of criminals, in his view – is behind the decline of western civilisation. Empathy isn’t bad, he says in the doc, it’s just that it’s 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 “if you were my employee, I would fire you”, and urges her to tell his estranged trans-daughter Jenna that “I’ll always love her” – and then cuts off her health insurance the next day.
Musk knew with a disconcerting degree of certainty that Trump would re-elected
In the film, St Clair describes the events of Trump’s election in November 2024. Musk, she tells Gibney, had a “degree of certainty” about the results before they came in that “I had never seen before”. He told her that he would “unleash the anomaly in the matrix” and that “we have 10,000 lasers in space”. Gibney leaves that comment hanging.
The godfather of AI is worried Musk might rig the next election
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning British-Canadian computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI”, 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’s more. “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” Hinton says onscreen. “If 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.”
Read the full story at The Guardian ↗
Alex Gibney’s marathon documentary delivers numerous eye-raising insights into the broligarch’s business deals, early idealism and apocalyptic appetite for fathering children.…
This lens runs the verified story through Cinnamon's AI — wired in the next step.
Veteran documentarian Alex Gibney’s film about the richest broligarch on the planet 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’s ascent and speaking to people in his orbit since late 2022, before his Maga turn and Trump 2.0.
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:
Musk is a genius – at tricking the government into giving him assistance
At Maga rallies, Musk has been introduced as “America’s biggest capitalist”, but Gibney reminds us that he’s always been more than happy to go begging to the state for handouts – 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 “battery swap” 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’s 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.
In spite of everything, there was something admirable about Musk once
Gibney’s film serves as a reminder that Musk has never been in possession of charm or charisma – 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’s partially an act, we learn from his ex-wife Justine when she recalls how self-consciously he picked his wardrobe, telling her “I can’t look cool or hip, because I need to look like an engineer”. 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.
Musk’s procreation drive is motivated by a fear of civilisational breakdown
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 “a legion of children” was driven by a fear of “civil war”. 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). “It’s no doubt he had a traumatic childhood,” Gibney said at a press conference in Venice. “He’s now playing out the trauma on the rest of us.” 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’s children are handled by his right-hand man Jared Birchall, a devout Mormon whom St Clair calls his “henchman” and “demon”.
To Musk, empathy is good in principle but not in action
Recently, Musk has held forth at length about his view that “suicidal empathy” – people who have more empathy for criminals than the victims of criminals, in his view – is behind the decline of western civilisation. Empathy isn’t bad, he says in the doc, it’s just that it’s 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 “if you were my employee, I would fire you”, and urges her to tell his estranged trans-daughter Jenna that “I’ll always love her” – and then cuts off her health insurance the next day.
Musk knew with a disconcerting degree of certainty that Trump would re-elected
In the film, St Clair describes the events of Trump’s election in November 2024. Musk, she tells Gibney, had a “degree of certainty” about the results before they came in that “I had never seen before”. He told her that he would “unleash the anomaly in the matrix” and that “we have 10,000 lasers in space”. Gibney leaves that comment hanging.
The godfather of AI is worried Musk might rig the next election
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning British-Canadian computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI”, 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’s more. “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” Hinton says onscreen. “If 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.”
Read the full story at The Guardian ↗
Veteran documentarian Alex Gibney’s film about the richest broligarch on the planet 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’s ascent and speaking to people in his orbit since late 2022, before his Maga turn and Trump 2.0.
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:
Musk is a genius – at tricking the government into giving him assistance
At Maga rallies, Musk has been introduced as “America’s biggest capitalist”, but Gibney reminds us that he’s always been more than happy to go begging to the state for handouts – 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 “battery swap” 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’s 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.
In spite of everything, there was something admirable about Musk once
Gibney’s film serves as a reminder that Musk has never been in possession of charm or charisma – 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’s partially an act, we learn from his ex-wife Justine when she recalls how self-consciously he picked his wardrobe, telling her “I can’t look cool or hip, because I need to look like an engineer”. 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.
Musk’s procreation drive is motivated by a fear of civilisational breakdown
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 “a legion of children” was driven by a fear of “civil war”. 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). “It’s no doubt he had a traumatic childhood,” Gibney said at a press conference in Venice. “He’s now playing out the trauma on the rest of us.” 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’s children are handled by his right-hand man Jared Birchall, a devout Mormon whom St Clair calls his “henchman” and “demon”.
To Musk, empathy is good in principle but not in action
Recently, Musk has held forth at length about his view that “suicidal empathy” – people who have more empathy for criminals than the victims of criminals, in his view – is behind the decline of western civilisation. Empathy isn’t bad, he says in the doc, it’s just that it’s 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 “if you were my employee, I would fire you”, and urges her to tell his estranged trans-daughter Jenna that “I’ll always love her” – and then cuts off her health insurance the next day.
Musk knew with a disconcerting degree of certainty that Trump would re-elected
In the film, St Clair describes the events of Trump’s election in November 2024. Musk, she tells Gibney, had a “degree of certainty” about the results before they came in that “I had never seen before”. He told her that he would “unleash the anomaly in the matrix” and that “we have 10,000 lasers in space”. Gibney leaves that comment hanging.
The godfather of AI is worried Musk might rig the next election
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning British-Canadian computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI”, 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’s more. “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” Hinton says onscreen. “If 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.”
Read the full story at The Guardian ↗
This lens runs the verified story through Cinnamon's AI — wired in the next step.
- Alex Gibney’s marathon documentary delivers numerous eye-raising insights into the broligarch’s business deals, early idealism and apocalyptic appetite for fathering children.…