Elon Musk is not the founder of Tesla. The founder of Tesla was a guy named Martin Eberhart and his partner Mark Tarponing. And in a lawsuit where Martin tried to claw back what he felt he was owed, Elon would only agree to settle the lawsuit when Martin agreed to say that Elon was what he wasn't, which was a founder of Tesla. It starts the mythologizing that Elon Musk is not an investor, he's an inventor.
I am here with Alex Gibney. Alex, great to see you again.
I've turned the tables on you. Last time you were talking to me, now I'm talking to you.
Well, so we're going to talk about that project. You have this new documentary on Elon Musk titled Musk, which at the time we release this will be out in theaters everywhere, and then eventually on HBO.
I got to think my audience is pretty deeply familiar with your work. You are on the very short, maybe two or three fingered list of the most famous documentarians in America at this point. You made Going Clear about Scientology, The Inventor about Elizabeth Holmes, the Armstrong lie about Lance Armstrong, Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room about Enron, that debacle. Yeah, you made many other films, but the ones I just mentioned really focus on some very selfish and deluded people creating a fair amount of harm. And that is a theme in your...
Current segue. Yeah, sounds like a segue.
So I've seen the film. You sent me a link to a screener and it's four hours long. It's really great and I can tell you about my experience watching it in a minute, but I have to think it was hard to cut down even to that length and I'm wondering why you didn't decide to do a 10-part series or a format like that which would have given you even more time.
It's a good question. I mean, ultimately, I think we decided that for all sorts of reasons that we'd explore a theatrical release, a kind of immersion in a theater. That's the way it was originally planned. And actually, I had a version of the film in the spring of 2024 that was virtually done, a two-hour version we were going to release for the fall festivals. But then Trump was nearly assassinated. Elon Musk hitched his wagon to Trump and my pals at HBO said, "You're not done. Keep going." And so, it reminded me a little bit of a comment that's in the longer version of the film that Elon Musk said. They say, if you're going through hell, keep going. So, I kept going.
Well, yeah. So that's a very interesting starting point because you started this film really kind of back in the time where it's somewhat analogous to Walter Isaacson's biography, right? I mean, he wrote this 500-600 page essentially hagiography of Elon which predates virtually all of the controversy of him lurching into right-wing politics and his misadventures on Twitter. And so things just started to get interesting after you had in some sense finished your film. Obviously you don't totally align with Isaacson's effort. I mean, you were covering the Twitter stuff from the beginning, but what was your perception of Elon when you started the project and how did that change? I mean, are there really two different Alex Gibneys associated with this project?
Well, there is a place where I started and there is a place where I ended up. I wouldn't say they're two different Alex Gibneys. And it was interesting the debate that we had always about Elon was, did he change in some radical way or did a part of his personality simply become more exaggerated? It was a debate we were constantly having because when I entered the story, you know, I owned a Tesla Powerwall at home. I had Tesla solar panels on my house and I found him to be a kind of intriguing sort of maverick inventor. Now, he was starting to go off the rails, you know, prior to this project starting. You know, there was thepedo guy episode with the diver who's trying to rescue the Thai cave kids and Twitter. Well, Twitter hadn't really happened yet. That was 2023. So, I was intrigued by him. And when I was approached to do a doc about him, I wasn't sure actually I really wanted to do it. But a friend of mine said, "No, no, no. You should do it. It's about 21st century power." And he was accreting a lot of power even then. He was at the time the richest man in the world. So I dug in and in part because he had a similarity to some of the characters that I had looked at in the past. And so I just thought I'd start and see where the journey took me. I didn't really think it was going to take me here, but it did.
So, yeah, I mean, I found the experience watching it a little disorienting because you cover all of the years of his public life really and some considerable portion of that period I was friends with him. But I wasn't, and I should say, if I haven't already, that you interviewed me for the film and so I'm in there to some extent. And I think when you interviewed me at the time, I was more on the side of thinking that Twitter and his engagement with his own algorithm and kind of growing fame and wealth and power had deranged him more than revealed him, right? Because I find this guy unrecognizable. But in watching your film, so much of the footage is contemporaneous with my friendship with him and I realized I wasn't watching most of his press coverage at all. I mean, so I was having a private experience with the guy, but I wasn't seeing so much how he was showing up in public. And I certainly didn't see him in all of his roles in life, right? So I was not seeing him as a bully and a narcissist and a fame and power seeking monster of any kind really. And yet some of that evidence was available had I been watching the footage that is in your film. And I want to go into, I mean, I certainly want to be as fair as we can be to Elon here. And I want to explore whether you're as fair as you should be in your film.
But before we dive into it, what's been the experience of making the film and releasing the film and dealing with any pushback from Elon? Has this been a kind of a standard documentarian's story or has this been an unusual experience for you?
Well, it's been both unusual and to some extent par for the course. I mean, there are a lot of films I started where I didn't have access to the central subject even though they were the central subject. Elizabeth Holmes never sat down for an interview with me. I found a workaround in that case. You know, in the case of Lance Armstrong and Eliot Spitzer, I spent a lot of time with them. The Enron guys never sat down with me, though I did get some high-ranking Enron executives, so that aspect was always a little, you never exactly know how it's going to work out. I had some exchanges with Julian Assange, but he never agreed to a sit-down interview. The thing that was odd about this one was, you know, there was a producer on my team, Jesse Deere, who had worked on two docs with Elon. And so we had an actual entree to him, and Jesse wrote him a number of letters, you know, that were convivial and urged him. But his exchange with me was very frontal and it was, you know, I mean it's chronicled in the film, but basically, I mean he went out on Twitter, his response to our intreaties was to go on Twitter and say, "Gibney is a douche."
And this was just at the first mention that you were making the film in the first place, the first time?
Not exactly. There had been an earlier mention of it where he said it was a hit piece, but this was a second mention I think accompanied by our invitation because of course I wanted him to be interviewed. That was my initial instinct. So yeah, but it was early and I was guessing at that point that I probably wasn't going to get the interview with Elon that I had hoped for. So I just tweeted back, "douche," and that was the end of our exchange. And then, you know, I faced a bigger problem, which is how do you get to the heart of a portrait of a person without the central person participating? But I had been there before so I just had to go through the process and see how it, go through the journey and see how it turned out.
Were there people who had a lot to say but weren't willing to go on camera to say those things?
Yes. And a lot of them either were close to Elon and didn't get his permission, or there were people who knew Elon reasonably well from a workplace standpoint. Some were inclined toward him, some weren't. But they were all terrified of appearing on screen because they were afraid that Elon might sue them or there would be other professional repercussions. And I think also among the higher echelons of either Silicon Valley investors or executives, you know, there's kind of a club. You don't speak out against other people. The one exception to that rule appears in the film, Reid Hoffman. But there was kind of like, "I'll talk to you off the record or on background." And some of that conversation was useful, but I found it particularly for the men who always like to be big swaggering characters in real life or in public life, you know, when it came to appearing on this documentary, shriveled into the shadows.
