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Watching the new Elon Musk documentary is like being punched in the face for four hours. Seriously, Alex Gibney’s new film is four hours long, and it’s traumatizing.
“It is traumatizing because he is a traumatizing figure,” filmmaker Gibney says. “And also to some extent, in certain narrative, thematic, and formal ways, I’m trying to put ourselves inside his head.”
That’s not to say you shouldn’t watch it. You absolutely should. The documentary, Musk, goes deep into the life of the world’s richest man. Gibney interviews business partners, Musk’s father, his wives and girlfriends. It’s … a lot and far from pretty. But Gibney’s film seeks to not just understand who Musk is, but how he became the man he is.
On a recent episode of What Next: TBD, host Lizzie O’Leary spoke to Alex Gibney about how we are all complicit, in some ways, in who Musk is and the power he holds. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Lizzie O’Leary: I think there are two big themes here. One is the sort of myth of self, right? The creation of the cruelty in there. And the other is the arc of what I think one could say is a con. And this is where I want to spend some time with Tesla, because you really see this demonstrated in two big threads in the Tesla section: the interviews with Martin Eberhard and Elon getting himself declared the founder of Tesla, and then the battery swap technology piece of this. So let’s start with the founder part. What do you feel like you saw in those moments?
Alex Gibney: Well, we can agree that virtually every CEO is a credit grabber. So, OK, he’s a credit grabber. But he went one step or two or three or five steps further than that when he had a big disagreement with Martin Eberhard and fired him. Martin Eberhard, who was the founder, both in terms of the technology and also the business plan of Tesla. He was the guy who had the idea that you start at the top of the market with a luxury product and then work your way down. When Musk fired him, he was refusing to give Eberhard what he felt he was owed. So there was a lawsuit that ensued, and the lawsuit was only settled when Eberhard would agree to say that Elon was what he wasn’t, which was the founder of Tesla. Now, to go that far to insist on that in a lawsuit in order to have it be official in some way, shape, or form that you are what you weren’t seemed really interesting to me, and part of a larger mythmaking thing. It’s not only mythmaking in a grand sense, but in Silicon Valley, it’s a real economic equation.
Right. Are you the founder?
Are you the founder? And to the founder goes all the spoils. It had a double utility. One, it enriched him personally, but it also allowed him to take on this appearance of sort of a Leonardo da Vinci character. He became the inventor as opposed to the investor, which is what he was.
Do you think he’s any good at engineering?
[Laughs] That was the subject of a lot of my inquiry, and you hear Jim Cantrell, who was with him at the beginning of SpaceX, and Jim says he’s a damn good engineer, but he’s not a trained engineer. So that gives you some sense. I mean, I do think Elon had the capacity to talk to engineers in a way that maybe many CEOs don’t. But I also talked to people at Tesla where I said, “Is Elon a good engineer?” They laughed out loud. When he took over Twitter, he went and said, “I’m a good coder,” and they were like, “Dude, you are so not a good coder, and you know nothing about our computer language. So what are you talking about?” So, I think there’s a lot of fake news—just as he says he’s a good gamer, and he has other people play his games for him
He cheats.
Yeah, he cheats, or he has other people playing his games for him and he takes credit. So it’s a classic, Oz-like creation of this extraordinary person who, you know, becomes the leading man in Walter Isaacson’s book.
Let’s talk about the battery swap technology, because it’s such an eye-glazing sounding thing, and yet it allowed Tesla to really change its financial picture. Can you explain it?
Sure, it’s not an easy thing to put into a movie, but it ends up being sort of this magician trick, which is kind of a classic con. It’s like, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat. So, the state of California said that they were going to give tremendous financial incentives if you could prove that you could massively improve the range of electric cars. The range is a big issue for electric cars, because the first person somebody who drives a gas car will ask you if you’re an electric car owner, as I am, is: “Well, aren’t you worried about the range?” So then he has this huge demonstration. It’s a big stage, and a BMW pulls up to a gas pump, and they start to pump the gas, and then a Tesla goes over this mysterious platform that we don’t know anything about. In theory what they’re doing is they’re swapping out the battery in less time than it takes to fill up a gas tank.
Right, and they’re split screens, they’re racing.
That’s right, they’re racing. And indeed, they do two battery swaps while they’re filling up the one BMW. But you never really see what’s going on beneath, and he treats it as if he’s solved the biggest problem that electric cars have, which is range. Because now you can just pull into a gas station, swap out your battery. Now, if anybody were to really think about it, a Tesla battery weighs a thousand pounds, and it’s covered with sealant and all this other stuff coming out of the factory. So the idea that you’re going to go someplace and swap it is fantastical, almost like going to Mars. But then he says, “OK, but we’re really gonna do it.” And then they set up these battery-swap stations, and an enterprising reporter named Ed Niedermeyer went out to see the station. And they’re there, they have the garages, they have hydraulic lifts, they have the batteries, but not one swap was done. All they had to do for the state of California was to prove that they could do it once, and California gave them bucketloads of money for that. When California saw that it was a kind of reward hack, they changed the rules to show that you really did have to do it. And then Musk claimed, which was the most outrageous thing of all, that the customers just didn’t want it. The customers just did not want the solution to the fundamental problem of electric cars. So it was a fantastic con.
And kept Tesla functioning.
It did, it did. Because at a time when they desperately needed those government credits, it kept Tesla alive. To some extent, you can sort of see with an impish grin—like, isn’t this kind of cool: The guy’s doing anything he can, he’s shucking and jiving to keep his company alive, take on the Big Three, but at the same time, he is engaging in larger and larger elements of what you might call fraud.
Well, when you talk to Sam Harris in the interview, he says, “I think he’s gone from being a liar, someone who has to keep track of the truth, to being a bullshitter,” where you just make stuff up and, through the force of your personality, make it so. And that is one thing when it comes to typing things on X that aren’t true. But that is another thing entirely when you are talking about technology that kills people. And in this movie, you see someone die.
Correct.
Tell me about the Benavides crash and why it is so important to understanding Autopilot.
So, Autopilot, which is—
It’s cruise control!
It’s cruise control, basically, because it’s designated a kind of Level 2 driver-assist program. Level 4 is where you’re really talking about autonomous driving. The idea was you’re supposed to be able to just sit in the driver’s seat and play video games if you want to. In fact, Musk goes on Joe Rogan and basically says, “Here’s the default for how you play video games and foil the technology we put in to say that you’re supposed to keep your hands on the wheel.” The Benavides case was something we ran across where somebody died. And the person who died was a woman named Naibel Benavides, who wasn’t driving a Tesla. She happened to be at the side of the road gazing up at the stars. But somebody was driving at a pretty fast clip and dropped his phone. He thought, Well, I’ve got full self-driving, I’m just gonna go grab my phone while the car drives itself. And then the car drives itself right through a red light, right through a barrier, right in, sadly, to Naibel Benavides and kills her.
The sequence in the film chronicles not only how Tesla’s faulty Autopilot was responsible for that, but in the investigation of it, Tesla very consciously, according to the lawyer, Brett Schreiber, really tried hard to hide data that showed that full self-driving was at fault. And in this case—because 67 people had died as result of Autopilot issues—the lawyer was able to prosecute it quite effectively because the victim was a pedestrian. The victim hadn’t signed any kind of Tesla contract agreeing to arbitration or any of those other things that so much of industrial America insists that consumers sign. And so they were able to take it and won a rather massive claim against Tesla.
I feel like that is a big emotional, difficult moment in the film, but then there’s also these emotional high points when, for example, SpaceX is finally able to get their fourth launch off the ground. And I found myself rooting for them to succeed.
I did too, and I think that’s part of the myth. Part of the myth is that it’s reality. It’s what makes Elon Musk different from Elizabeth Holmes. There’s real technology here, and this is the progression of somebody, and one of the things that I suggest in the film is that as he accreted more and more power, he became more and more reckless and more willing to risk the lives of others.
DOGE probably being an extension of that.
DOGE and particularly the killing of USAID, which is kind of like in the film, if you think 67 people died as a result of Autopilot, by the time he gets to DOGE, and the sudden shutdown of USAID, now we’re talking about a body count in the hundreds of thousands of children. So, yeah, it’s potent.
With the sort of hewing to MAGA, I wonder where you think he found the connection with them. Is it just that this administration was not going to investigate my companies and a Harris administration would have? Is it about being able to create DOGE and essentially make a data lake within federal agencies? Or is it about belief? And like, can you tease those things out?
Well, I don’t think he has a deeply sophisticated political belief system like, say, Peter Thiel does. I think he had certain libertarian instincts, but I do think he’s a man who wants to live a life without constraints. And things first start to turn for him during COVID. And I’m not talking about late COVID where people were arguing about whether kids should be kept out of school any longer. I’m talking about early COVID, like March and April 2020, where he’s pooh-poohing the whole idea. And why is he pooh-poohing the idea? Because it’s getting in the way of his factory. Out of sight, out of mind is the risk of the workers who have to go to that factory and might get COVID, and we don’t know at that point in time what kind of risk that poses for them.
So it starts to go there. And not long after that, he moves his center of operations from California to Texas, a much more business-friendly state, i.e., you pay to play. And then we start to see some of his belief systems start to change. He does have this personal issue, where he feels that his then son transitions to a woman, Vivian Jenna Wilson, and he says outwardly, “My son is dead.” Which I found kind of an appalling thing to say considering his first child did in fact die of SIDS, and Jenna, who’s a very vital and dynamic person, is still living and very much with us. But I think there’s the comfort of being in a group, after having been called out during COVID by some of his liberal friends. Now he’s like, “Oh, this is a new group,” because he’s starting to support Republican candidates in 2022. Secretly he’s supporting them, and he was briefly in 2024 a Ron DeSantis supporter. And then when Donald Trump is nearly assassinated, he goes all in for Trump. But at that point, I think, it became extremely practical because he made a lot of money. He was miffed by being left out of this summit for electric-car manufacturers during the Biden administration, but he made a lot of the money during the the Biden administration. But he saw an existential threat for him and his companies coming with the Harris administration, and he knew Trump was going to be the most transactional president in history.
I came away feeling very much like this was a portrait of malignancy. But malignance does not exist in a vacuum. What does it say about us that someone like this is allowed to exist and feels so unstoppable?
I asked that question at the very beginning of the film: How did he get so much power, and how and why did we give it to him? Because every step along the way, as you pointed out, in talking about the battery swaps, a lot of people could have raised issues then, but there was sort of this attitude of“oh fake it till you make it” and “it’s kind of cute.” Corruption has a kind of momentum to it. You start out small, and then the layers of corruption get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger as you go. You become more comfortable with it. But very often, corruption is hidden by a noble cause. Elon Musk wanted to go to Mars, and I’m going to save the climate crisis by investing in electric cars, and I think people got comfortable with those trade-offs without really thinking through the problem with that kind of corruption. They gave him a pass, and I think Democrats and Republicans both did and now we’re suffering the consequences.
