'Musk' director Alex Gibney dives into new doc film at Venice Film Fest

I think what I discovered was that the story of Musk was not, in a way, a new tech story, though there's much about it that is tech. But it's really, his story is the story of an old wine and a new bottle. His story turns out to be the story of the confidence man, the stock pumper. His wealth and power comes from inflated stock. And so I had told that story before with Enron and with Elizabeth Holmes. And so it was a story that was oddly familiar to me. So the new part was that I discovered that there was something familiar. In terms of the risk, I think the thing that struck me most was, particularly early on when I was trying to get people to talk, there was a tremendous sense of fear of talking, really almost existential fear, both among people who were his critics, people who were his business colleagues, and people who were his friends. I talked to, you know, many, many, many, many people, but very few, except for some of the brave people who are here, you know, declined to speak. I mean, I think that I posed the question at the beginning of the film, which is, how did he obtain, how did he, Musk, obtain so much power and how did we let him do it so in a way while musk is at the center of the film we're all implicated in the story because um for musk and for many of the tech bro-oligarchs um we've allowed them to accrete a tremendous amount of power so in that sense yes it is intended as a cautionary tale and i hope we have the strength to get out of the conundrum that we're in you can't emphasize enough this sort of pragmatic crony capitalist um aspect to his political uh objectives you know that that because he was very you you see him in the film cozying up to barack obama when it was convenient for him to do so um and then um and actually he did very well during the biden administration despite being snubbed by the biden administration but with trump suddenly and and with many other right-wing leaders around the world he sees the possibility of being able to buy influence that's kind of unprecedented because they're much more amenable to the crony capitalist idea and and also he got into the the thing that i think was really interesting to me which was confirmed by ashley and you know in conversations with him is that he sensed that he might be going to prison not only that but there were a lot of other civil investigations and so he was going to throw himself wholeheartedly behind somebody he knew he could buy results from uh and that was trump so i think it starts early but it's always pragmatic with him or you know and and he moves where the money is i do think that early on He was imbued with something I'm familiar with from some other characters in other films I've treated with something called noble cause corruption, which is to say my cause is noble and therefore in the pursuit of my cause I am willing and able and should be allowed to do anything in pursuit of that cause. the end justifies the means. And over time, that leads to a kind of legal and moral corruption that then allows you to elect a president of the United States whose stated goal is burn, baby, burn, drill, baby, drill, to actually destroy the planet. So it's a kind of remarkable transformation, but it's one that I'm familiar with. It's a kind of corruption. And the question is, and it's for me unknowable, you know, does power corrupt absolutely? Or as Robert Caro said, does power reveal who you really are? And those are the questions that I think are posed by the film. Two things that interested me about his past. One was, by all accounts by people who know him reasonably well, and indeed even his father and his own comments and his brother you know he had a childhood that was very difficult uh and uh traumatic and i i think to some extent that trauma is now he's now playing out that trauma on the rest of us if i were to psychoanalyze the situation but there's no doubt that he had a traumatic childhood well i mean i hope i i showed in the film um that he's involved in right-wing political parties all over the globe, in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in Brazil, in Turkey. And I think there are a number of reasons for that. That seems to be his ideology at the moment. But in addition to that, many of these right-wing governments tend to be more pliable. And it's easier to buy the results you want for administrations that are utterly corrupt and venal and have no sense of restraint or internal checks and balances. So, yeah, I think he's pursuing a global right-wing agenda, both for ideological and, I think, for very practical and monetary reasons. I can only—I've not met him, oddly, but having studied him for three-plus years, I would say that he has a very difficult time with empathy, and particularly what one would call cognitive empathy, which is putting himself in the shoes of others. He seems incapable of doing that. And you can see that in the way he takes over companies, in the way he treats people, real human beings, and indeed in the outcomes that they represent. So no, I would say he has enormous difficulty with cognitive empathy. I also think that one of the things that's interesting about the journey is that very early on, both with SpaceX and with Tesla, you know, he had very admirable goals. He was going to start a car company which had never been done before after the Big Three that would prioritize electric vehicles which would help address the warming of the planet. He was going to revive a space industry by making it more, it wasn't a new, the returnable rockets weren't a new technology, but he was able to manifestly make that process much more cheap. And I keep saying he, and I think we all say he. It's important to understand that these are companies. He's not the only person there. There are a lot of talented engineers who are at each company, and they're the ones who really make things happen on a day-to-day basis. It's not him. First of all, we intended to make a shorter film before Elon Musk became wrapped in the career of Donald Trump and the presidency of the United States, so there was that. But also, very early on, the first thing we did was to reach out to Elon Musk and ask for an interview, and he declined. And so we faced the problem of how to treat the central subject. And that became an elaborate journey because so much of what Elon Musk says, how shall I say, has an air of unreality around it. And so how to embrace the reality of what he said, but also the unreality. And in the service of that, we created this formulation that came out of Musk's own ideas about the notion that we're living in a simulation or in some kind of existential video game to convey in formal terms through a kind of avatar which speaks with Musk's actual words and a sort of video game imagery to convey both the reality of what he's done and the unreality of his narrative.