"Alex Gibney's 'Musk' Offers a Unique Perspective on Elon's Father"

Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk, agreed to be interviewed immediately.

Finally, the director spoke to a number of Musk's collaborators for his film. His first husband, Justin Musk, and his ex-girlfriend Ashley St. Clair appear. Journalist Cara Swisher, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, WIRED global editorial director Katie Drummond and I also spoke with Gibney for Musk, which opens in theaters nationwide on Friday. But the landing of Errol Musk, with whom the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has a complicated relationship, was a turning point.

"The rest were convinced by a lot of persuasion," says Gibney. It was very hard for people to come forward because the stakes of talking about Musk in an honest way were high.

Once Gibney had interviewed all of his subjects, he had enough material to make a documentary that would run roughly four hours, including a 10-minute intermission. It's a damning portrait of the trillionaire CEO, showing how much of his genius is based on his extraordinary ability to promote his own myths — and the stock prices of his public companies.

Musk never interviewed Gibney. Instead, the director's team researched every public comment Musk had ever made and created an Elon Musk clone that appears throughout the film.

I spoke with Gibney earlier this month about his experience making the film, why he decided to make his clone Elon attractive, and what materials he had to put on the cutting room.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Zoe Schaefer: Alex Gibney, thank you so much for being with us today

This shouldn't spoil anything, but in the four years you spent creating the mask, Elon Musk never agreed to sit down with you for an interview. Instead, your team looked back through the archives of everything he's ever said publicly, and you put together a sort of simulated interview that appears throughout the film as an interlude. Basically, it plays off Musk's idea that we're all actually living in a simulation. How did you decide on this approach for the film?

Well, what were we going to do? He is the main character.

I actually thought that because he was so outspoken about the idea of simulation, we should lean towards that cinematically. We got to play in Elon's sandbox and have a simulated interview. As we started to develop this idea, using his actual words, his actual audio recordings, but putting them into a kind of avatar that we were designing, I think there were all kinds of thematic reasons for doing that.

One was because he himself said that we live in a simulation. But the importance of this concept in Elon Musk's story of shifting sand between what is real and unreal was twofold. Also, since so much of the film deals with his AI issues, that disturbing relationship that we're all starting to discover, all of us on planet Earth, with these AI LLMs and how we're starting to design things in these computer interfaces, it seems like this might be something interesting.

However, you'll notice that when Elon is talking to people in a typical interview situation, he rarely looks at the interviewer or the camera. He is always looking this way or that way. So we designed it in a very different way, where he's looking straight down the barrel of the lens directly at the viewer, and we thought that's okay. We're going to give Elon a break, and actually, I thought our avatar represented him pretty well compared to some of his recent pictures.

I have a question about that because your cloned Elon Musk - I think it's fair to say - looks a lot worse than today's Elon Musk. He is kind of chiseled and tanned and…

exactly Was this a deliberate choice? And if so, can you just talk about why this happened?

was I joke about this, but she is the star of my movie, I want my star to look good. But I think it would be wrong to venture into AI territory, like some of the pictures Elon's fans are posting of me right now, to visually humiliate him.

Also, to some extent, the story is about image making. So I thought, "Okay, let's have some fun with it." Because we had many choices. I mean, we started with the design firm, what should he look like? What should he wear? You know, we put him in a gamer chair, a leather jacket. There were conscious choices.

This extends to some of the comments he makes, which I don't see as the most confusing comments Elon has ever made.

When someone talks about something, I want an answer from Elon.

We were looking for the best reactions, like how could he get back at us? Now, later in the film, his statements become more and more outlandish, but that's part of what's going on.

I think it really worked for the movie. I've seen it a few times and I think there are these famous pictures of Elon Musk. I think of someone who's on a yacht and he's shirtless. There, it seems like you'd be playing on his turf if you were leaning towards a less flattering image, but in a way that undermines the film's message. While raising his appearance allows you to hold him fully accountable, in a way that seems entirely fair.

Yes, we were respectful and looked at it well. And it's much better when we go to the archives, especially the SpaceX IPO archives, when he starts to look like Kim Jong Il.

I'm curious about your thoughts on ethics. That's not putting words in anyone's mouth, because those are all statements that Elon Musk has actually made, and it's not even like you're particularly mashing things together.

But your decision, for example, to have her look directly into the camera, you decide for her in a way that you can't with a live interview subject. So I'm just curious if you could talk about the ethical implications of that.

I think that's at the heart of the difference between a documentary like this and maybe a podcast interview is that we're presenting that image in a kind of broader cinematic context. The image itself is meant to convey meaning or create questions for the viewer to start thinking about.

As you know from the interview for the film, we interviewed you in front of a green screen and then put you in the background which we kind of show at different times in the film. It all has to do with this weird kind of unreal, real unreal world that we live in right now.

But also by shooting him looking into the lens, sometimes I do that and sometimes I don't. There's this interesting psychological relationship that you start with subject matter 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 film and the formal tools within the film itself that reflected some of the thematic concerns.

It also makes him feel like there's a lot of conviction behind what he's saying, and that there's a connection between him and the audience.

I feel that throughout his public life, he does not seem to have any allegiance or ideology to a coherent political identity or even to his colleagues or close friends. These things are changing and changing. So I'm curious how it came about for you in the making of the film that you want to convey an Elon Musk in a simulated interview that is, quote-unquote, the "real Elon" as best you can.

I mean, an image that morphs and is ultimately a composite, which is useful, especially when you're using it as a vehicle to express these expressions. I agree with what you just said about Ilan's ideology. I think there are a lot of wise, very wise books written that I think sometimes create a kind of critical flaw. They try to provide a coherence to Elon's thinking that I'm not sure is there. I think he's much more of an improviser and shapeshifter. He has an image of himself that he wants to convey, but he sculpts and changes that image according to circumstances and evidence, as he did with Obama versus his treatment of Trump.

I mean, there was some history there, but they still both serve the same purpose for him, which is, "How do I get the most resources out of the federal government?"

I have thought about this enough. I think his purchase of Twitter now serves as a very clear example of what was clearly an impulsive decision at the time, but now that it's become a huge source of political power for him, there's a tendency to go, "Oh, he was playing a complicated game all along."

My view has always been that if Elon has a superpower, it's because he has a very high risk tolerance, and therefore can make rash, hasty decisions and then deal with the consequences in a way that a slightly more cautious person might not be able to, for better or often worse.

He lives such a risk-taking vacation with his canoe moving towards the rapids. When he sees a stone there, he goes this way. He sees another rock or a changing current, he goes in that direction. In the case of Twitter, as you point out in your book, he kind of bought the company on a dare, and he paid handsomely for it, and he also gave up all the due diligence.

From a businessman's point of view, this was just dumb. But he didn't care, and he had plenty of resources, so what did it matter? Twitter, now X, was always a vehicle for his ambitions and his ability to attract retail investors.

I don't think it occurred to him until later, when he had destroyed the value of the company for the rest of us, that this would actually be a good advertising platform for me. This is what happens. Then suddenly it actually has enormous political and economic utility, in a way that I don't think he thought of at first.

So Musk aside, a lot of people spoke to you for this movie: Musk's first wife, Justin. His ex-girlfriend, influencer Ashley St. Clair, with whom he has a child. his father; former business partners; former colleagues; the people he fired; Samantha Power, former ambassador to the United Nations; Cara Swisher.

Walk me through the process of getting these people to say yes to trust you. In particular, was there someone who really surprised you in wanting to say yes immediately, and someone who really needed extra time and conversation with you to be able to say yes?

Almost everyone who appeared in the film needed time to process and accept their presence, in part because there was a sense of danger. Only one person immediately agreed, and that was Errol Musk.

It was almost like that line from that great movie "You put me in..."

We had Errol Musk in Salaam. "Hello Errol, would you like to be in this documentary?" "Yes." We quickly got a crew to his house. I did a remote interview in South Africa. It was an interview we did that wasn't green screen, and he was remarkably revealing, sometimes in ways we intended and sometimes not.