It's unprecedented for one person to have that much power and global power.
But it's also undergirded by his alliance with, of course, the president of the United States. He said, 'But I wouldn't know if I was living in a simulation, would I?' So he's joking on that, that maybe he's being played by an alien, but I think emotionally he does take the point of view that he is player one and everybody else is an NPC, a non-player character.
Hello, Bob. How's it going?
I'm doing okay. Let me introduce this. I'm Robert Wright, publisher of the Non-Zero Newsletter. This is the Nonzero Podcast. And you're Alex Gibney.
Famous documentary maker, Academy Award-winning documentary maker, in fact. And the maker, most recently, of the documentary we're going to talk about, on Elon Musk. It's called Musk. Um, I had the pleasure of watching it last night. It's great. It's epic in the pretty literal sense of the term. Um, and congratulations, first of all.
Uh, you are the — well, let's see. You're the director, narrator, and co-writer. Um, so you did have something to do with it. Uh, really, really well done. Uh, you know, I'm something of a Musk watcher, but even I learned a number of things I didn't know about him. Not all of them flattering, I must say. We'll get to that. Uh, but, you know, no matter how much you think you know about Elon Musk, uh, there's more, and I think you'll find some of it in this. Um, I've got to ask — at some point, I assume somebody, and I wouldn't have recommended that you take this advice, but somebody must have suggested calling this Citizen Musk.
Yeah. No, no doubt. It was an option. Of course, I had already used a citizen title. I had done a film called Citizen K about Mikhail Khodorkovsky. So I felt going back to the citizen well might be a little much.
Well, you could make it your brand. Uh, anyway, I mean, the reason it springs to mind — you know, Citizen Kane was, of course, although a feature film about a real-life figure, a media baron, William Randolph Hearst, and he was larger than life than Elon Musk was. And also, you know, Orson Welles, as he was, I guess, inclined to do, decided to go big, you know. I forget how long it was, but you know what I mean — new filmmaking techniques that made the guy look literally larger than life. And you decided to go big, in the sense of making, for one thing, a long documentary. Uh, I've got to say though, it doesn't flag. I mean, you know, I was ready for more. I mean, it has an actual intermission for those who see it in the theater. Um, and then, of course, once it gets to streaming, this won't be an issue. But at some point, like, did you set out planning to make your average two-hour thing and then at some point just go, 'No, there's too much here'? Or what? Was there a moment?
I did. No, no, I did. And indeed, I think it was spring of 2024, we pretty much had the makings of a good two-hour film and were ready to release it. But once —
— Trump was nearly assassinated and Musk hitched his wagon to Trump, right?
My friends at HBO said, 'No, no, no. Keep going. Just keep following the story, because this is going to get a lot bigger.' And indeed it did.
Yeah, that worked out well. And by the end of it, I mean, another parallel with Hearst kind of is that, you know, arguably the guy had more power than is healthy for one man to have. I mean, Hearst back in the days when, you know, the media was a little more one-dimensional — if you ran as many newspapers as he did and had the views he had, you could exert real influence. By the end of the documentary, I had thought about the power issue with Musk, but I'm really, you know, I was even more sensitive to it. There's so many, like, dimensions of power he has and could potentially abuse. And in fact, you provide circumstantial evidence, which we can get to, that in the last election he did something untoward. Uh, you know, you got a hold of some text messages that suggest something kind of ambiguous, but we'll get to that. But the sheer power, it's kind of unprecedented, right? I mean —
It's unprecedented for one person to have that much power and global power.
Um, but it's also undergirded by his alliance with, of course, the president of the United States.
I think there's a line in the film, you know, and they agreed to kiss and make up after that brief Epstein blow-up.
That being when Musk — well, they had had a blow-up and then Musk said, you know, 'Trump's in the Epstein files and that's why they're not investigating,' or whatever, on Twitter. Not a way to cement a bond with someone.
No, but I think ultimately they both discovered that they needed to kiss and make up, because, as I say in the film, Musk had the money to keep Trump in power and Trump had the power to keep Musk — and the money.
Yeah. That's why I thought they wouldn't break up at all, and then when they did, I figured they'd find a way to reconcile. Um, yeah, so the film kind of starts out — I mean, I want to talk about a motif that spans the film that you use. The film starts out with Musk calling you a douche on Twitter. I guess he had caught wind of the fact that you were making a documentary. Uh, he for some reason had the intuition that it was not going to be flattering. Can't imagine why. No, I don't know. I don't know how much evidence there was.
To be honest, early on, you know, I had sort of mixed views about him. I mean, as I point out in the film, I owned a Tesla Powerwall, I owned Tesla solar panels, and he was kind of an intriguing sort of maverick figure.
Um, and so I had hoped that he would sit down, and I reached out, but the response, 'Gibney is a douche,' was not the one that seemed to be an open invitation. I did respond, as I show in the film, 'douche' on Twitter.
Yes, with the accent on the é — that was clever. How much time did that take — did your wife...
It was an instant, but it took me about three or four minutes to figure that one out. Okay. So, um, yeah.
And so — you don't, I mean, there's a lot of footage of him actually saying things. There's a lot of found footage of him, you know, on various stages of his life saying things. Uh, but as for kind of, I guess, contemporary Musk speaking through the documentary, what you do is you set it up with reference to his — I definitely want to get into this — his seeming near-conviction that we're living in a simulation. So it's kind of, one might infer, a video game for him. Uh, and so you have a simulation, a deepfake kind of a Musk, a kind of video-game-esque, but pretty photorealistic version of Musk saying things. Now, I may have missed this at the beginning. Is that a combination of things he wrote and actually said, or what?
In other words, the audio that the avatar Musk speaks with in the film is analog. In other words, it's either podcasts — it could be audio — but it's all actually recorded stuff. We didn't actually take written words. And then the trick was to design a kind of simulated interview. Um, two angles, one looking straight at camera, one off-angle. And, you know, we designed sort of a lair for him, as well as a gamer's chair, and gave him a leather jacket. And then we used some sort of modified AI tools to sync it to picture.
Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah. Well, it works well, and —
And it seemed warranted, given that he is obsessed with this idea of a simulation, and also there were other issues relating to what is real and what is unreal, particularly in regards to Musk.
Well, it's funny. Uh, I mean, a new connection I made — you know, somebody I know who knows him pretty well, uh, once told me, 'One thing you've got to understand is that he takes social Darwinism seriously.' I mean, I took that to mean that Musk thinks, you know, the weak should suffer if not perish and the strong should survive, and that's nature's way and that's good in his view. I mean — and, you know, I wondered. His mind seems so opaque but manifestly weird. I wondered, like, well, in his version — because I've heard things that make it really clear that I think he really does think this is a simulation. Like, I mean, I'll get to one of them in a second — but I started wondering, you know, there's also various signs that he is indifferent to the suffering of others, you know, including people he's fired en masse on a whim, uh, some of whom were government workers that I thought were kind of more my employees than his, since I'm paying their salary.
Uh, but, you know, and his father tells this story — in the documentary, they were driving along and some — I don't know — some tragedy happened. There was like a dead guy. There's like this thing that would get anybody's attention. But young Musk, the child, he says, never looked up from his comic book. He was like focused on the comic book. Of course, focus is an interest — is a skill in itself if you're an entrepreneur. That's an interesting aspect of that. But there's also the seeming indifference to the fact that there was a dead guy. Anyway, what I'm wondering is, like, in his version of the simulation, uh, you know, one can imagine that — I mean, I'm sure he's the hero, right? He's the guy who's kind of —
Of course — he's player one.
Right. But is he the only sentient being? I mean, that is one scenario, right? Like, I started wondering — I kind of suspect he doesn't think that, but with him you can't really rule it out — that that's why nobody else's suffering matters, because it doesn't exist. I think that intellectually he — because even he jokes about it. Even in the second appearance of the avatar he said, 'But you know, I wouldn't know if I was living in a simulation, would I?' You know, so he's joking on that, that maybe he's being played by an alien, but I think emotionally he does take the point of view that he is player one and everybody else is an NPC, a non-player character.
In some sense, certainly morally, but —
Possibly because he doesn't even think that they actually suffer.
Well, and yeah, it becomes a kind of rationalization for his performative cruelty. Um, you know, if it's a game, what difference does it make? And after all, you know, simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation — it's just a game.
Yeah. Now, I really think he believes the simulation thing. I heard him not long ago on a podcast say — and like he really meant it. I mean, that's the thing about Musk. The virtue of him is he will sometimes speak in what seems to be a candid way. But what he said was, he was talking about a simulation, and he was talking about some things that were happening in the world — maybe to him, I don't know — he said, by way of providing evidence of a simulation, he said, 'Because that is what would happen in the video game, right?' And I thought, you know, Elon, the reason there's such a correspondence between video games and life is because they model video games after life. Okay. Doesn't necessarily mean — but then I thought, no, he was probably referring to these days in the world we live in. You know, you could be saying, 'Look, this is just getting so weird that it has to be a simulation,' or something. And I think that's more what he meant. And I had the terrifying thought that a guy with this much power, like, the more weird and chaotic it gets, the more it's an affirmation of his worldview. And I think he's pretty sure he's going to come out okay, because he's the hero. Right.
That's right. And I think also what Musk thinks is both complicated and also oddly simple. I think at times — or basically, I would say in the sense that it keeps changing. You know, it's not like the view of the simulation, of the video game, is coherent. If he really thought it through, it's not coherent; it becomes convenient for him. So these are things that he believes. But I think one of the great flaws in Musk, that has been exacerbated by the power that he keeps secreting — which is the reason I put that old movie, The Man Who Worked Miracles, in the film — is that he thinks it's almost as if, if he says it, it is. So, and he says things with such confidence, including some absolutely crazy things that have no chance of happening, like, 'We're going to be on Mars next year with a million people,' or whatever, you know, that he just has this enormous confidence. He is a kind of confidence man.
Yeah. And you have that — you interviewed Reid Hoffman, and you have him saying a little something like that. He said, 'You've got to understand, he believes 100% — like, if he says I'm going to do this, he can do it.' Um, you have Musk in there in 2017 saying that by the end of the year, a Tesla will be able to go without a driver from coast to coast. And we may be approaching the point where that's true. I've heard very good things about the most recent version of self-driving. But the question does arise in general. I want to hear more about what you think is going on inside his head, because although you do some explicit commentary, you don't do that psychoanalyzing.
No, I don't. We kind of flick at it and suggest. We have a section on his childhood, which I think is intriguing and interesting. And one of the things you pointed out, also, his father — the way his father speaks, and his sort of reveling in violence, and indeed killing three people, seems intriguing.
His father shot three black men in South Africa, I gather. He said one of them had a gun, at least. Uh, I don't know. But anyway —
Yeah. I wasn't able to include the full interview, but he claimed he shot three men with two bullets. Um, so you know...
Yeah, it's a .357 Magnum. Um — so anyway, but also Elon's brother and Errol Musk's son says that Errol was a kind of fabulist and a gaslighter, but also had this power where he kept coming at you with his version of events until slowly you started to believe him. Now, I put that in there because I think that is very much what Musk will do. He does it to a lot of us, and he did certainly to his partners. And Justine Musk, his first wife, said the first time she ever learned about gaslighting, it was from Elon Musk. So it's this character who creates his own reality and does so with a sort of force of personality that is seemingly hard to unpack, because there are a lot of biographers who seem to have accepted his vision of reality in a way that I find troubling.
Yeah. And I should say it's a tribute to him — I mean, it's a tribute to you as a filmmaker that the film never lags, but it's also a reflection of him. I mean, you could have gone on a lot longer, because that guy — this guy —
Yeah, I'll bet. Uh, you know, you do show that he deserves less credit for various things than he's given. For example, arguably the person known as the founder of Tesla should be the person who actually founded it. But he's done a lot of stuff. I mean, that rocket lands, right?
No — Starlink is out there and nobody else did it. And, you know...
So, you know, he is an amazing person at the same time. Uh, you know, as we said, to get back to this question of what you think is going on inside his head: when he says in 2017 that by the end of the year this thing — is it possible he really believed that? Uh —
I think that the best liars — and maybe he isn't quite a liar, because maybe he's a bullshitter. I think at times he moves in and out of being a liar, or a liar has to keep track of the truth in a way that a bullshitter doesn't. But I do think that the best fabulists, you know, really believe what they're saying at the moment they say it. They convince themselves that what they're saying is true, even though deep down they know it's not true. I mean, I once did a doc about Lance Armstrong, and he had the capacity to say, 'How dare you say that I, as a cancer survivor, would ever do performance-enhancing drugs.' And then he'd get down off the podium and he'd do a bag of blood. So, you know, there's that. And I do think that somebody like Elizabeth Holmes —
Another subject of one of your documentaries. Uh, indeed, very good. Yeah.
You know, she had the capacity to look people in the eye and convince them that what she was telling them was real, even though it clearly wasn't real, and she really should have known better and probably did know better. So I'm pretty convinced that when Musk said in 2017, 'By the end of the year we're going to be able to go driverless, you know, from coast to coast,' he knew that that wasn't going to happen. And yet, somehow — was it possible? Maybe it's possible. And he says it with conviction, with confidence. That's what the confidence man does. You know, the Music Man or anybody else — they're able to look you in the eye and say, 'This is happening.' And by the way, it has the —
— the added benefit of pumping up the stock, because that's kind of where I was going with this. There are certain things about him that make him seem mystical, a visionary of the future, and other things that make him seem like a kind of powerful stock pumper, you know, who just keeps making unrealistic and unbelievable claims, and people accept them because they think, 'Oh, he's Elon Musk.' And going back to what you were saying earlier, he did this — he did Starlink, he did those reusable rockets, he did Tesla. Well, I mean, he was the prime investor in those companies, but he's not the only engineer at those companies. Gwynne does a great job of running SpaceX. And he did, though, have a pretty good sense — I'll give him credit for this — both at SpaceX, which after all owned Starlink, and also Tesla: he created a pretty good sense of mission at those companies.
And that attracted a lot of high-powered engineering talent, which is, I think, one of the reasons they go. But that sense of mission may get to my own personal obsession in terms of the psychology of some of these powerful figures, which is that Musk may be afflicted with what cops call noble-cause corruption, which is to say you posit that you have a noble cause — i.e., 'I'm going to make an electric car company, and that's going to help reduce global warming,' and 'We're going to become a multiplanetary species, you know, so I'm going to invest in Starlink.' Over time, you think, 'Well, these are important causes.' And so if I have to cut a few corners — well, if I have to lie a bit, if I have to lie a lot, if I actually have to kill people, you know — then it's okay, because the end justifies the means.
We should stipulate that he's committed no murders so far as we know.
That are defined as such under the law.
Um — or any other... In fact, I was going to ask you, like, uh — you know, as we said, he's very powerful. I've got a feeling that after this comes out, he's not going to be any more favorably disposed to you than he was before. Well, actually, we'll save this question for overtime. I was going to ask you, does it worry you? I mean, I will say he's been in disputes with so many people. I don't fear for your safety personally.
We took precautions. And what he does, or what he has a tendency to do — and I know this because he's done it to other people, some of whom are in the film — um, he uses X, formerly Twitter, to stir up vitriol and hatred toward people that he doesn't like.
And then crazy things happen, because when people seem to get permission to do terrible things, sometimes they do. And at the very least, um, you become the subject of a lot of vitriol, either online and sometimes at your house, because he tends to dox people. That's the other thing he does.
So there is that. Um, and obviously he's the richest man in the world. He has a lot of legal resources at his disposal, and indeed his lawyer, Alex Spiro, did threaten to sue us right out of the gate — not having seen the film, of course, just under a misapprehension of what we in fact said in the film, which relates to that possible interference in the 2024 election.
Yeah, let's get to that in a second. Um, I wanted to ask — did you interview the father? I thought I heard your voice.
