Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’ Has a Unique Perspective on Daddy Issues

Eventually, the director would speak with scores of Musk’s associates for his film. His first wife, Justine Musk, appears, as does his ex-girlfriend Ashley St. Claire. Journalist Kara Swisher, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, myself, and WIRED global editorial director Katie Drummond also spoke to Gibney for Musk, which hits theaters nationwide on Friday. But landing Errol Musk, with whom the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has a complicated relationship, was a watershed. “Everybody else took a lot of persuasion,” Gibney says. “It was very difficult to get people to appear because the risk profile for talking about Musk in a way that was honest was high.” Once Gibney interviewed all of his subjects, he had enough material to make a documentary that runs nearly four hours, including a 10-minute intermission. It’s a damning portrait of the trillionaire CEO, detailing how much of his genius is based on his formidable ability to promote his own mythology—and the stock price of his public companies. Musk never agreed to an interview with Gibney. Instead, the director’s team researched every public comment Musk ever made and created a simulated Elon Musk who appears throughout the film. I spoke with Gibney earlier this month about his experience making the film, why he decided to make his simulated Elon attractive, and what material he had to leave on the cutting room floor. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. ZOË SCHIFFER: Alex Gibney, thank you so much for being with us today. ALEX GIBNEY: Good to see you, Zoë. This shouldn’t spoil anything, but in the four years that you spent making Musk, Elon Musk never agreed to sit down with you for an interview. 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. Basically, it plays into Musk’s idea that we are all, in fact, living in a simulation. How did you decide on this approach for the film? Well, what were we gonna do? He’s the main character. I actually thought because he’d been so outspoken about this idea of a simulation, that cinematically we should lean into that. We should play in Elon’s sandbox and have a simulated interview. As we began to develop that idea, by using his real words, his actual audio recordings, but placing them in a kind of avatar which we would design, I think there became all sorts of thematic reasons to do it. One was because he himself had said we’re living in a simulation. But two was the importance of this notion in the Elon Musk story of the shifting sands between what is real and what is unreal. Then also, because a lot of the film deals with his issues of AI, that discomfiting relationship that we’re beginning to explore, all of us on planet Earth, with these AI LLMs and how we begin to project things on these computer interfaces, it felt like this might be something interesting to do. By the way, you’ll notice that when Elon is talking to people in a normal interview situation, he rarely looks at the interviewer or at the camera. He’s always looking this way or that way. So we designed this in a very different way, where he’s looking right down the barrel of the lens directly at the viewer, and we thought that that would be OK. We’re gonna give Elon a break, and actually, I thought our avatar made him look pretty good compared to some of the recent images of him. I have a question about that because 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 … It is kind of a two-day growth of beard. Exactly. Was that an intentional choice? And if so, can you just talk about why that was? It was. I joke about this, but he’s the star of my movie, I want my star to look good. But I think also it would’ve been a mistake to go into slop AI territory, like some of the images that Elon’s fans are posting about me right now, to sort of denigrate him visually. Also, to some extent, the story is also about image building, too. So I thought, “OK, let’s have some fun with that as well.” Because we had a lot of choices. I mean, we started out with the design firm, like how should he look? What should he be dressed in? You know, we put him in a gamer chair, a leather jacket. There were conscious choices. That extends to some of the comments he makes, where I don’t find like the most bumbling comments that Elon ever made. When we have somebody speaking about something, I want a rejoinder from Elon.  We looked for the best rejoinders, like how can he come back at us? Now, later on in the film, his statements become more and more fantastical, but that also is part of what happens. I think it really worked for the film. I’ve seen it a couple times and I think there are these famous images of Elon Musk. I’m thinking of the one where he’s on the yacht and he’s shirtless. There, it seems like if you had leaned into a less flattering image, you would’ve been playing on his turf, but in a way that would undermine the message of the movie. Whereas elevating his look allowed you to hold him quite accountable in a way that comes across pretty fair. Yeah, we were respectful. We gave him a good look. And much better by the time we go to the archive, particularly the archive of the SpaceX IPO, when he’s begun to start looking like Kim Jong Il. I’m curious about your thoughts on ethics. It’s not putting words in someone’s mouth, because these are all statements that Elon Musk has really made, and it’s not even like you’re particularly mashing stuff together. But your decision, for example, to have him look right at the camera, you are making decisions for him in a way that you couldn’t with a live interview subject. So I’m just curious if you could speak to the ethical implications of that. I think that goes to the heart of what’s different about a documentary like this and maybe a podcast interview in the sense that we’re rendering that image in a kind of broader cinematic context. The imagery itself is intended to either convey meaning or to raise questions for the viewer that they should start to think about. As you know from being interviewed for the film, we interviewed you in front of a green screen and then placed you in a background, which we sort of reveal at different times in the movie. All of this had to do with this kind of strange unreality, real unreal world we’re living in right now. Mm-hmm. But also by shooting him looking into the lens I sometimes do that and I sometimes don’t. There is this interesting psychological relationship that you begin to have with a subject that I think is both real and unreal at the same time, which was part of this larger conceit in terms of trying to find a way to make the movie and the formal devices in the film itself reflect some of the thematic concerns. Right. It also makes him feel like there is a fair amount of conviction behind what he’s saying, and there’s this relationship between him and the audience. I feel like over the course of his public life, he doesn’t appear to have had an allegiance or ideology to one coherent political identity or to even his colleagues or close friends. These things are shifting and changing. So I am curious how that kind of came up for you in the making of the film of wanting to convey an Elon Musk in the simulated interview that represented, to the best of your ability, the quote-unquote, “true Elon.” I mean, it’s a shape-shifting image and one which is, after all, confected, which is useful, particularly when you’re using it as a vehicle to put these statements in. I agree with your point that you just made about Elon’s ideology. I think there are a lot of wise and very perceptive books that have been written that in my view sometimes make one kind of critical flaw. They try to render a coherence about Elon’s thinking that I’m not sure is there. I think he’s far more of an improviser and shape-shifter. He has an image of himself that he wants to convey, but he’ll sculpt and change that image according to conditions and evidence, like the way he acted with Obama versus the way he acted with Trump. I mean, there was a history there, but still they’re both serving the same purpose for him, which is, “How do I cadge the most amount of resources out of the federal government?” I’ve thought about this a fair amount as well. I think his acquisition of Twitter now acts as a very clear example where in the moment it was clearly this impulsive decision, but now that it’s become this big source of political power for him, there’s this tendency to be like, “Oh, he was playing a complicated game all along.” My view has always been that if Elon has a superpower it’s that he has a pretty high risk tolerance, and so he’s able to make 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. When he sees a rock there, he goes this way. He sees another rock or a shifting current, he goes that way. In the case of Twitter, as you pointed out in your book, he kind of bought the company on a dare, and he grossly overpaid for it and also abandoned all due diligence. From the standpoint of a businessman, it was just dumb. But he didn’t care, and he had so many resources, what did it matter? Twitter, now X, was always a vehicle for his ambitions and his ability to court retail investors. 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. That’s what it becomes. Then suddenly it actually has enormous 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; the former ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power; Kara Swisher. Walk me through the process of getting these people to say yes, to trust you. Specifically, was there anyone who really surprised you in their immediate willingness to say yes, and anyone who really needed extra time and conversation with you in order to be able to say yes? Almost everybody who appeared in this film needed time to be able to process and accept appearing, in part because there was a sense of risk associated with it. Only one person agreed immediately, and that was Errol Musk. Oh my gosh. It was almost like, what’s that line from that great film “You had me at …” “You had me at ‘hello.’” We had Errol Musk at hello. “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 in South Africa. It was the one interview we did that was not green screen, and he was remarkably revealing, sometimes in intended and sometimes in unintended ways. Everybody else took a lot of persuasion. I was having conversations with Justine for over a year, I think, before she agreed to sit down. Even somebody as powerful as Reid 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. In some cases 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 found it interesting that there’s sort of like talking to people in a gentleman’s club, and one doesn’t talk about other people publicly. While I did learn things when they were talking to me on background or off the record, I found that kind of revolting in a way. It’s like we’re dealing with a fig