Government handouts, 10,000 lasers – and the election of Trump: six things we learned from Elon Musk’s film

INSummer documentarian Alex Gibney’s film about the planet’s richest bro-ligarch became one of the most anticipated films at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The 72-year-old Oscar winner, whose previous films have focused on the US military, the Catholic Church, Vladimir Putin and Scientology, investigates the tech mogul’s rise and interacts with the people in his orbit from late 2022 until his turn into The Magician and Trump 2.0.

The result lasts just under four hours and is a definitive answer to the question of how one man managed to amass so much money and political influence. What’s shocking is not so much any of the individual new information that Gibney unearthed, but rather the totality of it. Here are six things the film tells us:

Musk is a genius: he tricked the government into giving him help

At rallies in Maga, Musk was introduced as “America’s biggest capitalist,” but Gibney reminds us that he was always more than happy to ask the government for handouts—for example, courting Obama to win government contracts for SpaceX to launch satellites for NASA and the military. The film chronicles Tesla’s June 2013 press conference, where Musk unveiled a new “battery swap” system that promised to remove and replace a Model S’s dead battery with a fully charged one in just 90 seconds. As it turned out, the technology was never implemented, and interviewees told Gibney that the Harris Ranch demonstration site was barely used for the process. Instead, the filmmaker suggests that Musk’s over-promising allowed Tesla to receive more ZEV credits from the California government, which are awarded to electric vehicle manufacturers based on range and which Musk can then sell to more polluting manufacturers.

Regardless, there was once something admirable about the Mask.

Gibney’s film serves as a reminder that Musk has never had charm or charisma – a petulant constant poster retweeting praise, not far removed from the egotistical 20-something startup guy. But what he did with the money he made from selling shares of his first software companies, Zip2, X.com and PayPal, was unusual, Gibney admits. Where others turned to venture capital, Musk turned to engineering. Part of this is an act, we learn from his ex-wife Justine when she recalls how self-conscious he was about choosing his wardrobe, telling her, “I can’t look cool or fashionable because I need to look like an engineer.” But in footage of Musk biting his nails with fellow engineers during a SpaceX rocket launch, his enthusiasm and emotional investment are genuine and, at times, infectious.

Musk’s desire to procreate is motivated by fear civilizational collapse

Musk has 14 publicly known children, and sources tell Gibney there are likely more. Some were conceived in romantic relationships, but more recently the circumstances of their births appear to have been entirely commercial, thanks to sperm donations to employees of his companies. In a text message to one of his former partners, influencer Ashley St. Clair, Musk said his desire to have a “legion of children” was driven by fears of “civil war.” In the documentary, the roots of this fear largely go back to his South African childhood (in one scene, his father Errol Musk speaks with no apparent remorse for shooting three intruders in their home). “There is no doubt that he had a traumatic childhood,” Gibney said at a news conference in Venice. “Now he’s acting out the trauma on all of us.” But, oddly for a man who has long been a prominent atheist, the film also hints at the religious aspect of his vision of the apocalypse. The dirty business of negotiating payments and non-disclosure agreements with the mothers of Musk’s children is handled by his right-hand man Jared Birchall, a devout Mormon whom St. Clair calls his “minion” and “demon.”

According to Musk, empathy is good in principle, but not in action.

Musk recently detailed his view that “suicidal empathy”—people who he believes sympathize more with criminals than with victims of criminals—is behind the decline of Western civilization. Empathy isn’t a bad thing, he says in the document, it’s just become too superficial. But the interviews in the film raise questions about whether Musk is even capable of empathy. This is the man who tells his wife that “if you were my employee, I would fire you,” and convinces her to tell his ex-transgender daughter Jenna that “I will always love her,” and the next day he takes away her health insurance.

Musk knew with a stunning degree of certainty that Trump would be re-elected.

In the film, St. Clair describes the events of the November 2024 Trump election. Musk, she tells Gibney, had a “degree of confidence” in the results before they were produced that “I’ve never seen before.” He told her that he would “release an anomaly in the matrix” and that “we have 10,000 lasers in space.” Gibney lets this comment go unnoticed.

The godfather of artificial intelligence is worried that Musk could rig the next election.

Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning British-Canadian computer scientist known as the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” used to be friends with Musk, but the pair fell out after Hinton rejected his offer to join the board of xAI. In the film, he makes it clear that he doesn’t trust Musk to responsibly weigh the risks and benefits of AI, and that’s not all. “It’s very clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on ruining the midterm elections,” Hinton says on screen. “If you wanted to skew these midterm elections and wanted to use AI, all you had to do was get detailed information about US citizens. And what Doge did looked like exactly what you would do.”