アレックス・ギブニー監督が語るイーロン・マスク・ドキュメンタリー：父エロルと「自信の男」の実像

AI can make businesses faster. It can also make mistakes, expose data, and execute the wrong instructions faster. ThreatLocker helps organizations set boundaries AI cannot ignore by controlling what applications can run, what they can reach, and how they interact with sensitive resources. Innovation needs more than good intentions. It needs limits. Control AI with zero trust at threatlocker.com slash wired. That's T-H-R-E-A-T-L-O-C-K-E-R dot com slash wired. From Wired, this is The Big Interview. I'm contributing editor Zoe Schiffer sitting in this week for Katie Drummond. My guest today is the documentarian Alex Gibney. If you've ever taken an interest in cultive personality or hugely consequential abuses of money and power, chances are you've already seen one of his films. Alex was taken on topics ranging from Elizabeth Holmes to Enron to Vladimir Putin to Scientology,

He won an Academy Award for his 2007 documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, about claims of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay during the Bush administration. And now he's taken on the world's richest man in his new documentary about Elon Musk, which opens nationwide in theaters this week. Alex Gibney, thank you so much for being here today. Good to be here. Yeah. So Musk examines the legend of the investor, inventor, the entrepreneur, Elon Musk, and the many, many ways he has managed to interfere with basically the entire world. This doesn't spoil anything, but in the four years that you spent making this film, Elon Musk didn't agree to sit down with you. Instead, your team looked back through the archives of everything he has said publicly, and you put together a sort of simulated interview, which appears throughout the film as a through line.

And it goes with this idea that Musk has that human beings are being played as part of this giant video game, that we are, in fact, living in a simulation. So my first question for you is just how did you decide on this approach for the film? Well, I mean, necessity is the mother of invention. And so he didn't agree to appear. And so what were we going to do? Because he's the main character. Of course, there's archival footage of him. But I actually thought because he'd been so outspoken about this idea of a simulation, that cinematically, then we should lean into that. We should play it Elon's sandbox and have a simulated interview. Yeah, I mean, your simulated Elon Musk, I think it's fair to say, looks a lot hunkier than present day Elon Musk. He's kind of chiseled and tan, and he's sitting in this, like, sweet leather chair. And it's kind of a chiseled growth of beard. Exactly. Was that an intentional choice? And if so, can you just talk about why that was? It was. I mean, partially, sort of, I joke about this, like, he's the star of my movie.

I want my star to look good. I thought, let's lean into the best imaginable image of Elon. And also, to some extent, the story is also about image building, too. So I thought, okay, let's have some fun with that as well. Yeah, I think it really worked. My view has always been if Elon has a superpower, he has a pretty high risk tolerance. And so he's able to make kind of impulsive, rash decisions and then deal with the fallout in a way that a slightly more cautious person might not be able to for better or often worse. He's so comfortable with risk. It's as though he goes through life. on a canoe moving down the rapids. Because in the case of Twitter, he bought the company kind of on a dare. And he grossly overpaid for it and also abandoned all due diligence. I mean, from the standpoint of a businessman, it was just dumb. But he didn't care and he has so many resources. What did it matter?

I think he didn't really come around. And while Twitter, Alex, was always a vehicle for his ambitions and his ability to, you know, sort of court retail investors and create a kind of cult online, I don't think it occurred to him until later when he had virtually destroyed the value of the company for the rest of us that actually this would be a good propaganda platform for me. And that's what it becomes. and then suddenly it actually has enormous both political and economic utility in a way that I don't think he thought through at the beginning. So Musk aside, plenty of people did speak to you for this film. Musk's first wife, Justine, his former girlfriend, the influencer, Ashley St. Clair, who he has a kid with, his father, former business partners, former colleagues, people he's fired, former ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, Tara Swisher,

walked me through the process of getting these people to say yes. Almost everybody who appeared in this film needed time to be able to process and finally, you know, accept appearing, in part because there was, you know, a sense of risk associated with it. only one person agreed immediately and that was errol musk that it was almost like we had errol musk at hello you know hello errol would you like to appear in this documentary yes we quickly rushed a crew over to his house i did a remote interview um in south africa it's the one interview we did that was not green screen and uh he was remarkably revealing sometimes an intended and sometimes an unintended waste everybody else took a lot of persuasion i mean i i was having conversations with justine for over a year i think before she agreed to sit down um even somebody as

powerful as reed hoffman same thing so it was very difficult to get people to appear because musk's the risk profile for talking about musk in a way that was honest was high and in some cases Because, you know, I did talk to a lot of people, sort of powerful people in Silicon Valley on background, some of whom had fond feelings toward Elon and some who didn't. I do want to talk about Errol Musk. There's this very powerful interview in the film where he talks about his son. He seems to have had a very big impact on Elon Musk's life and not necessarily a positive one. Right. So I'm curious to get your perspective on Errol's influence on Elon and how you balance showing the hardship of his childhood without using that as an overly simplistic explanation for his behavior today. Right. I think that's an important point.

I do think that Errol Morris had a powerful impact on Elon, both because of how Elon felt he was treated by his dad, sometimes cruelly, psychologically. We don't know of any kind of physical abuse. But also, I think, you know, by watching Errol, the apple doesn't fall from the tree. There's an element you can see in Errol, the character of Elon. You know we kept it in a kind of short contained section and as a kind of element of how we can think about Elon Musk There are a lot of people who been bullied or abused by their parents who don end up becoming bullies or abusers and to say it a kind of a mechanical thing that happens is kind of letting it's letting elon musk off the moral hook But I think the conclusions were sort of a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card for the performative cruelty that ultimately he engaged in.

It can be an explanation without being an excuse. Pelosi, whether you love her, one of the best speakers the House of Representatives I've ever had, or hate her. That crazy Nancy, she is crazy. She's a force to be reckoned with. We're not letting anything stand in our way. From KQED, part of the NPR network, The Speaker, how Nancy Pelosi changed the face of power. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. I would imagine that in the making of a film like this, there is an open question at the beginning in particular about whether you're actually going to get enough access for this to work. I'm curious if there was a particular interview, I would guess, with someone close to him where you knew, like, okay, we're going to be able to do this.

I think we're going to have enough. Well, weirdly, it didn't happen until very late. And I would say it was the Justine Musk interview. I mean, the Ashley St. Clair interview is as powerful as it is, and it is powerful, and it gives you a front row seat to the election of 2024. The Justine Musk interview gave me insights into his personality that were very powerful in both understanding him as a person, but also understanding some of what he did thematically. and because i i asked her and this answer is not in the film but but it helped to guide me you know what was it that attracted you about him back in college they met in college in canada and she said it was his enormous confidence and then the other thing she said that's powerful that's in the film is that i learned about gaslighting from elon musk that gaslighting thing the idea of of trying to convince somebody that the truth is other than what it is and to and to suggest that you're crazy

and if you don't go along is a super important insight into who Leon is. And the confidence, of course, is what allows that to happen. That's why I like I really like this term confidence man, because it gets to the whole issue of a con. But it's also this idea of how do you perpetuate a con? It's with confidence. You know, you say things that are absolutely outrageous. We're, you know, full self-driving is a solved problem or we're going to be on Mars next year. He says it with such confidence. the, you know, insights into the human being really become valuable in terms of understanding the larger context. Yeah. Yeah. She was such a powerful interview in the film. I think, you know, there are multiple moments where she cries or is, you know, near tears. And she comes across just so genuine. And I think she also seems like someone who doesn't appear to be in it for attention or power or money. Like, there's a point in the film where I think she says, you know, I really wanted to have a say in how this story was told.

And it appeared that at multiple times in the past, I'm thinking specifically of when their first child died by a SIDS-related incident. And Elon Musk tweets that he was holding the child. The child died in his arms. And Justine says, no, this was one of the most defining moments of my life. he died in my arms um you really just see how elon has hurt her over the years that's right um that i mean in a way that the moment that you recall gets me kind of emotionally worked up even as i think about it because of course that moment was deeply painful for elon But to sort of credit grab in the midst of a tragedy like that seems so petulant and small. And also, you know, sort of talk about main character syndrome.

That is kind of one of the defining things about Elon Musk is that over time, as he increased more and more power, there was only one character in all his companies. And that's Elon Musk and only one character in all of his marriages. That's Elon Musk. Everyone else recedes into the background. I don't want to ask you to speculate, but I am curious about your take on this, because it's a question that I have had about Elon Musk. Does he actually believe what he's saying or is he knowingly lying? I think it's closer to the former. And I've dealt with a number of characters who are like this. You know, Sam Harris in the film makes a distinction between liars and bullshitters. And liars, of course, have to assiduously keep track of the truth in order to know when and how they're lying. Bullshitters just say what comes in their mind. I think it's a kind of it's on the right track, but sort of insufficient.

I think for somebody like Elon Musk or people in the past that I've dealt with like Elizabeth Holmes or the guys at Enron or even somebody like Lance Armstrong, in the moment, because you feel a kind of righteousness about your cause, you feel you're kind of entitled to make things up. and you feel over time so entitled and so corrupted by this notion that the end justifies the means that some kind of psychological trick is played inside your own mind where in order to be forceful and confident about what it is you're saying in the moment you have to believe it i mean i i reckon with that with lance armstrong where you know he could look people in the eye at a press conference say with great force how dare you say that i is a cancer survivor ever use performance enhancing drugs and then we get down off the podium and do a bag of blood you know so right but i think in

the moment he did believe what he said because that's how you come off as being effective and but i i think it's a and you see it particularly for people who become a kind of you know addicted to a growing power that they have, and they see that also they have an ability to convince, like Elizabeth Holmes did. It's a psychological road that, road is not a good word, but it's a psychological quirk that kind of takes over, and it's peculiar, but I think it's real. It's so hard to remember when talking about Elon Musk that this goober is an Occupy Mars t-shirt who's thrashing around with a chainsaw, waxing poetic about Mars. He has had this undeniable impact on so many people's lives and livelihoods. And a lot of that impact has been negative. The part of your film about Doge,

that Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency which is a short stint in Washington D where he fired I think 300 federal workers to quote unquote solve the federal deficit Spoiler alert he didn even come close That was probably one of the hardest moments to watch. Samantha Power, former ambassador to the U.N., spoke specifically about the lives lost, thousands and thousands and millions more projected, after he shuttered USAID. I'm curious, given all you know about Elon Musk at this point and the reporting you did on Doge, what do you think that period and that experiment was really about for him? It wasn't about waste, rot, and abuse. You know, there was an aspect of glee and performative cruelty that we tried to represent in the film by showing the Doge cuts as a kind of first-person shooter game. juxtaposed of course with um the sober testimony of samantha power who talks about

how many children died as a result and this is a great crime that elon musk has committed even greater than his crime at autopilot but i think in in many ways the doge experiment or the doge carnage the the waste fraud and abuse was kind of the magician's sleight of hand to say this is what we're doing but what he was really doing was really something very self-serving which as a big tech baron was literally destroying the regulatory state and if there was a lot of collateral damage people died you know disease went up you know who cared and and and of course you know it was the destruction of the inspector's general consumer finance protection bureau he called everything corrupt without any evidence and so on i really think it was about destroying the regulatory state and ultimately destroying any um pushback on uh ai or or the stock market which he then continues to exploit because i think

he's always exploiting flaws in the american system and doge it's it's that writ large the other thing and the more controversial thing which we're all still chasing in a way is the fact that the doge boys uh who knew were clueless about the agencies they went into nevertheless seemed to know an awful lot about uh data extraction and data access and they were granted uh according to one head of IT at a federal agency I talked to, super admin status, which you know better than I, allows them, you know, sort of to break through all sorts of silos that are intended to be erected to either, you know, protect classified information or protect our private data. And so the Doge Boys had access to vast amounts of data that no one has ever had access to in history. And all of that, I think, was kind of it didn't go unnoticed, but it was the flash over the chainsaw and all of the press conferences

kind of hid a lot of what was really going on, I think. Yeah, there's a couple moments that flagged that for me specifically. I'm curious to hear what they were for you. But to me, if you're really worried about waste, fraud, and abuse, then there's a certain level of care that you would take in your auditing. The Doge Boys were posting on X this kind of, quote-unquote, wall of receipts where they would talk about contracts that they've slashed, not understanding that in procurement paperwork, oftentimes you'll put the total lifetime amount that could ever be spent on a contract, which is sometimes quite different, millions of dollars different from the actual amount that was spent. So they were claiming savings that were nowhere close to what had actually been saved. There was another, and this is in the film as well, moment where Elon Musk was talking about how they were finding tons of people who were getting Social Security benefits who were 150 years old, not understanding that when you don't have a birthday for someone in the Social Security system, which is built on very arcane technology, really old code.

It defaults to a birthday that shows someone as 150. Anyone who had worked in SSA would have been able to tell them that, but they didn't seem to me to be particularly interested in the details, which, again, if you're really worried about waste, fraud, and abuse, that's all about details. Correct. And indeed, the detail that you mentioned about Social Security was actually posted on the Social Security website. so they they could have went they could have read the website but it goes to this kind of performative cruelty where they it it almost didn't matter to them you know because because if you're thinking about i i think on one of the all-in podcasts they go on um on and on and on about how wise this is for elon because it's a form of zero-based budgeting well you don't practice zero-based budgeting which was the idea that you you imagine uh you know no revenues coming in or no expenditures and then you think back to well what do we need and you build it up from zero

but you don't practice zero-based budgeting while government programs are ongoing or government programs that have already been paid for it's a little bit like firing the pilot while he's driving the plane and and they never bothered to actually look into stuff so it was and nor did they really seem to care about the impact that they were really having Pelosi whether you love her one of the best speakers the house of representatives of ever hat or hate her that crazy nancy she is crazy she's a force to be reckoned with we're not letting anything stand in our way from kqed part of the npr network the speaker how nancy pelosi changed the face of power find it wherever you get your podcasts one of the more chilling interviews which i got from the deposition was with

one of the Doge boys, a kid named Nate Kavanaugh. And the questioner asked him, did you not care about, you know, the lives that were being affected by all of these mass firings and the kind of pain and suffering that would cause? And he said, well, no, because we thought it was more important to reduce the federal deficit. Next question, did you reduce the federal deficit? No. And he says it with a face that's so, it's what the Japanese call the shidan kao, the unknowing face, totally without affect. But for a guy who's supposed to be such a genius, you would think there would be some analysis done. But that parallels what happened at Twitter. They would fire people at Twitter who had actually critical jobs without even knowing what they did. Right. And, I mean, as our client has talked about this, I think it's really true. Like, at Twitter, you know, when you make a rash decision or you fire people, like the feedback loop with the company or social media is pretty small. You

can see the effects of that pretty quick. The site starts to get glitchy. You can hire back people. In government, the feedback loop is really long. You don't get to see immediately the impact of those decisions. And to me, that appears to be a large reason why the effects were just so much more devastating And honestly while he has admitted publicly Doge was a failure like it seems like there was no move made to kind of correct any errors In a way, it was sort of like, I think even as a failure, it was sort of an intended failure in the sense that it was an attempt to really fire cannons at the government, and particularly the regulatory state in a way that couldn't be, you know, so the castle couldn't be repaired. Yeah, I guess I should say the stated goal of the budget deficit was a failure,

but the implicit goal was quite successful. That's right. Yeah, it was really successful. and the other thing that is so disturbing about the doge moment is that you know in a lot of cases they were literally warned about the damage that was done and that was certainly the case at USAID you know that you can make as a country a decision that we're not going to give aid to developing countries anymore um but money had already been appropriated by congress indeed food had been bought to send to starving children in some cases boats were literally stopped um to prevent that food from going to the children who then subsequently died while they ended up burning the food on pallets someplace literally wasting food that had already been bought and paid for so the cruelty had a kind of performative quality to it, which was meant, I think, to speak to the kind

of roiling anger that, you know, Musk is so good at fomenting on X and which the MAGA movement, of course, is so good at exploiting politically. Toward the end of the film, Jeffrey Hinton comes on and says, quote, it's fairly clear to me Trump is hellbent on corrupting the midterm elections. If you want to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, what you need to do is get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what Doge did looked to me like just what you would do if you wanted to get data on U.S. citizens. Basically, he's saying Musk appears to have already gathered up the data Trump would need to meddle in the upcoming election. We're now less than a month out. so based on the interviews that you conducted and the information that you have coming out of this project i'm curious what you are most worried about um and and kind of what is the concern

in terms of what musk may have been cooking up and how do you see this perhaps playing out i mean the first thing i should say is i don't really know we just looked and and hinton who's a savvy um i mean he's the godfather of ai knows a lot about ai and he says it looks like this is what happened we don't know for sure what's happening but if i were to hazard a guess and there is an ai being trained on all that data you know there's any number of ways you could use it pre-election one is you know where you're going to devote the money you guys are doing a lot of interesting reporting now about where the money is going and how much of it is going to focus on negative advertising versus you know pro um candidate stuff but also um what kind of stories are people particularly susceptible to we know from years of having our data mined by facebook and x and and others that um you know it's really useful to know what people respond to and what people think and you have enormous data about them then you can message certain things in order to be

able to reach those and reach those soft points psychologically. I guess, though, I would have to say at this moment, because it does look like we're not far away from the election, and it looks like it's going to be a blue wave wipeout. I, you know, we'll see. But if it is, my bigger concern is over a disinformation campaign, notably led by Trump, but aided and abetted by Elon Musk with massive amounts of data that would try to undermine people's confidence that the election was free and fair. That's what I fear most at this moment. The documentary comes in just under four hours, but I know from talking to you that there was a ton that you left on the cutting room floor. And so I'm wondering if you can just speak before we close out today about what parts you had to cut that were the hardest, what you wish you could have kept in, and how you ultimately made those decisions.

I mean, in some ways there are, you know, there are sections that I wish I could have kept at their expanded length. One of them is Twitter, you know, where we had a lot more detail about the chaos of Twitter. um you know um doge also um and the errol musk interview there were a lot of things i would have liked to have expanded rather than have to condense to their essence but there was also you know there's a couple of more frauds um you know the solar city story was one that we left out which was a really interesting story both from the standpoint of flim flammary and also the fact that they were literally setting people's roofs on fire with their solar panels um there was a russian influence story that was quite powerful though we never got to like a a kernel of the that would indicate exactly the dimensions of it but there was a counterintelligence investigation the the whole sec thing about the tweets and then we got incredible an incredible um

deposition i love depositions they show so much about people sometimes particularly people in power were being held to account in the deposition in the tornetta case which was all about his compensation and uh that's where he goes somebody says so what is your role at tesla who you're i'm told you're a techno king what is that he said well there's technology and there's a monarch And so I'm like the monarch of technology. You know, this kind of stuff, it's just beyond belief in terms of the way he acts. And it was a moment that was so pure in terms of just capturing it. So there was a lot of wonderful detail that was left on the cutting room floor. Maybe someday for all of us geeks, we'll release it. We'll get the six-hour cut. Yeah. Alex, thank you so much for being here. Zoe, pleasure. The Big Interview is produced by Lina Masitsis.

Our executive producer is Kate Osborne. Music and mixing by Pran Bandy. This episode was fact-checked by Samantha Spengler. And I am, of course, your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. Check back here on Thursday for the latest episode of Uncanny Valley, where Wired's writers and editors add you to their Slack channel. The End NPR Network, The Speaker, How Nancy Pelosi Changed the Face of Power. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.