00:00:35.380Well, so we're going to talk about that project. You have this new documentary on Elon Musk,
00:00:40.140titled Musk, which at the time we release this will be out in theaters everywhere,
00:00:45.440and then eventually on HBO. I got to think my audience is pretty deeply familiar with your
00:00:50.900work. You are on the very short, maybe two or three fingered list of most famous documentarians
00:00:57.600in America at this point. You made Going Clear about Scientology, The Inventor about Elizabeth
00:01:03.600Holmes, The Armstrong Lie about Lance Armstrong, Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room about Enron,
00:01:08.880that debacle. You made many other films, but the ones I just mentioned really focus on some
00:01:15.220very selfish and deluded people creating a fair amount of harm. And that is a theme in your
00:01:21.420current effort. It sounds like a segue. Yeah. It sounds like a segue.
00:01:23.920So 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.
00:02:10.820We were going to release for the fall festivals, but then Trump was nearly assassinated.
00:02:15.460Elon Musk hitched his wagon to Trump and my pals at HBO said, you're not done. Keep going. And so
00:02:23.660it reminded me a little bit of a comment that it's in the longer version of the film that
00:02:29.340Elon Musk said. It said, they say, if you're going to hell, keep going. Or if you're going
00:02:33.120through hell, keep going. So I kept going. Well, yeah. So that's a very interesting
00:02:38.480starting point because so you started this film really kind of back in the time where
00:02:44.340somewhat analogous to Walter Isaacson's biography, right? I mean, he wrote this
00:02:48.680five, 600-page essentially hagiography of Elon, which predates virtually all of the controversy
00:02:56.180of him lurching into right-wing politics and his misadventures on Twitter. And so things just
00:03:03.020started to get interesting after you had, in some sense, finished your film. Obviously,
00:03:08.260you don't totally align with Isaacson's effort. I mean, you were covering the Twitter stuff from
00:03:12.640the beginning. But what was your perception of Elon when you started the project and how did that
00:03:20.560change? I mean, are there really two different Alex Gibneys associated with this project?
00:03:26.080Well, there is a place where I started and there is a place where I ended up.
00:03:29.560I wouldn't say they're two different Alex Gibneys. And it was interesting, the debate
00:03:34.000that we had always about Elon was, did he change in some radical way or did a part of his personality
00:03:43.560simply become more exaggerated? It was a debate we were constantly having. Because when I entered
00:03:48.580the story, I owned a Tesla Powerwall at home. I had Tesla solar panels on my house. And I found
00:03:56.140him to be a kind of intriguing sort of maverick inventor. Now, he was starting to go off the rails
00:04:01.200you know prior to this project starting you know there was the pedo guy episode with the
00:04:07.060with the diver who's trying to rescue the Thai cave kids and and Twitter well Twitter hadn't
00:04:13.400really happened yet that was 2023 so I was intrigued by him and when I was approached
00:04:18.500to do a doc about him I wasn't sure actually I really wanted to do it but a friend of mine said
00:04:23.760no no no you should do it it's about 21st century power and he was accreting a lot of power even
00:04:29.420then. He was at the time the richest man in the world. So I dug in in part because he had a
00:04:35.920similarity to some of the characters that I had looked at in the past. And so I just thought I'd
00:04:43.840start and see where the journey took me. I didn't really think it was going to take me here, but it
00:04:49.160did. So yeah, I found the experience watching it a little disorienting because you cover all of
00:04:58.260the years of his public life really. And some considerable portion of that period, I was friends
00:05:04.160with him, but I wasn't, and I should say if I haven't already, that you interviewed me for the
00:05:09.820film and so I'm in there to some extent. And I think when you interviewed me at the time, I was
00:05:16.960more on the side of thinking that Twitter and his, you know, his engagement with his own algorithm
00:05:23.380them and kind of growing fame and wealth and power had deranged him more than revealed him,
00:05:29.280right? Because I find this guy unrecognizable. But in watching your film, so much of the footage
00:05:37.140is contemporaneous with my friendship with him. And I realized I wasn't watching most of his
00:05:42.460press coverage at all. I mean, so I was having a private experience with the guy, but I wasn't
00:05:48.060seen so much how he was showing up in public, and I certainly didn't see him in all of his roles
00:05:54.140in life, right? So I was not seeing him as a bully and a narcissist and a fame and power-seeking
00:06:02.640monster of any kind, really. And yet some of that evidence was available had I been watching the
00:06:12.280footage that is in your film. And I want to go into, I mean, I certainly want to go in, I want
00:06:17.440to be as fair as we can be to Elon here. And I want to explore, you know, whether you're as fair
00:06:23.080as you should be in your film. Sure. But before we dive into it, what's been the experience of
00:06:29.480making the film and releasing the film and dealing with any pushback from Elon? Has this
00:06:35.040been a kind of a standard documentarian's story or has this been an unusual experience for you?
00:06:42.820Well, 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 Elliot Spitzer, I spent a lot of time with them.
00:07:04.060The 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.
00:07:18.780The thing that was odd about this one was, you know, there was a producer on my team, Jesse Dieter, 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.
00:07:34.940But his exchange with me was very frontal and it was, you know, I mean, it's chronicled in the film, but his response to our entreaties was to go on Twitter and say, Gibney is a douche.
00:07:49.520And this was just at the first mention that you were making the film in the first place, the first time around?
00:07:54.080Not 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.
00:08:24.080And 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?
00:08:32.700But I'd been there before, so I just had to go through the journey and see how it turned out.
00:08:38.960Were there people who had a lot to say but weren't willing to go on camera to say those things?
00:08:45.060Yes. 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.
00:09:09.100And 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.
00:09:22.020Yeah. But that was kind of like, well, 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.
00:09:43.760right right so did you reach out i mean so i guess since elon took the position that the film
00:09:50.160was going to be a hit piece early on no one who would who still counts themselves among his friend
00:09:56.040group would be inclined to have have sat down with you because they would feel they were betraying a
00:10:01.280friend there even even just to sing his praises in that context yeah and i found that odd i mean
00:10:06.100there was a one person i'm thinking of in particular i went to who i know rather well
00:13:01.080but how do you resolve that tension as a, as a storyteller?
00:13:06.800Well, you're right that he's not Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes didn't have a product,
00:13:10.080you know, that box, as we discussed, it was, it was a joke. And you're right. He,
00:13:15.140he was a, well, and is a great industrialist in some ways. I mean, you know, let's acknowledge
00:13:20.640some of his superpowers. You know, he had an extraordinary determination to succeed.
00:13:24.820He put his money where his mouth was. He turned out to be an incredible money raiser. Now,
00:13:30.280later on when we get to the other side i'll describe some of the fraudulent ways he raised
00:13:35.560money but he really did raise a lot of money and also at both of those key companies tesla and
00:13:41.240spacex he created a sense of mission that i think did attract an extraordinary number of very
00:13:47.240talented engineers and executives and there's a woman now who runs spacex really gwynne shotwell
00:13:53.640who was critical and i also interviewed a you know a guy who was there at the foundation well i
00:13:58.440interviewed two people who were at the foundation of both companies, both interesting in many ways,
00:14:03.120but, you know, on the SpaceX side, he attracted a lot of, you know, extraordinary engineers,
00:14:08.760and he got it done. You know, Tesla became a going concern and really helped to push other
00:14:17.040car companies around the planet to succeed. Now, I think a lot of companies have since eclipsed
00:14:22.680tesla because elon took his eye off the ball and for a lot of other reasons but to say that that he
00:14:29.560really launched it he wasn't the first in fact in many important ways he was almost always the
00:14:34.980second to do something but he he managed a a way forward that really was propulsive in a way that
00:14:43.700was massively successful you can't take that away from him that's a fact so what has he actually
00:14:49.660lied about i don't know if you want to organize this that your your thoughts on this you might
00:14:56.340track through the specific companies i don't know how i don't know how you want to enter it
00:15:00.180i think the best way is is to look at tesla because that's kind of where we started
00:15:04.260and i think also the best way to understand this is it's kind of there's the self mythologizing
00:15:10.900we could start there and then we can start with tesla the company and how he was able to get
00:15:16.780money for it. Because in order to get money for it, he had to go to the stock market. And in order
00:15:21.500to get to the stock market, he had to exaggerate certain aspects of the company in ways that were
00:15:26.940deeply fraudulent. But let's start with the founding of Tesla. Because Elon Musk is not
00:15:31.100the founder of Tesla. The founder of Tesla was a guy named Martin Eberhardt and his partner,
00:15:35.640Mark Tarpening. But they were the ones who came up with the essential technology, the lithium-ion
00:15:42.600battery pack that gave the cars so much torque i mean that's why they were faster or or had
00:15:49.800greater acceleration the lamborghini yeah and also they had the business model laid out in
00:15:56.280their original plan for tesla which was start at the high end of the market you know get people
00:16:01.000excited about the car because before that time you know electric cars were mostly like sewing
00:16:05.560machines on wheels right yeah but but get people excited about the car and then and it's expensive
00:16:11.360initially, but then as more people start to like it, you can drive costs down as you increase your
00:16:17.120market share. So all of that was done by Martin and Mark initially. Elon comes in as an investor
00:16:23.660and he's spending most of his time at SpaceX. But somewhere along the line, as Tesla began to
00:16:30.620succeed, Elon bristled over this idea that he wasn't getting as much credit for the company as
00:16:36.540Mark and Martin. And ultimately, he pushed Martin out of the company. And in a lawsuit where Martin
00:16:43.000tried to claw back what he felt he was owed, Elon would only agree to settle the lawsuit
00:16:48.480when Martin agreed to say that Elon was what he wasn't, which was a founder of Tesla.
00:16:53.620Now, that's kind of an odd moment. Of course, we can all agree that CEOs are credit hogs.
00:16:58.680But I think to insist in a document that there is a kind of foundational lie at the heart of who you are is an interesting moment because it starts the mythologizing that Elon Musk is not an investor, he's an inventor.
00:17:14.920And that would become the essence of the pitch that he would use with people in order to shower him with really high stock valuations based on what he was going to deliver in the future, but way out of proportion to the kind of pitiful economic fundamentals that the company for much of its time evidenced.
00:17:36.120So there's that. And then starting with Tesla, there's an interesting moment of which I discovered by talking to a few people and they pointed me to a video, which was a kind of a demonstration, a sort of Steve Jobs-like demonstration where he's demonstrating something called the battery swap.
00:17:51.480And, you know, we can all agree that the first question that anybody asks you, if you drive an electric car, and I do drive one, it's not a Tesla, it's a Polestar.
00:18:00.080But, you know, the first question people ask me is what's the range?
00:18:03.420Because it's like, even though most people only drive 15 to 20 miles a day, nevertheless, that's the obsession that people have.
00:18:11.440So, okay, if you could solve the range problem of a car, of an electric car, that would be great.
00:18:17.360So Elon comes up with this technique for a battery swap where, and he has a big demonstration with a BMW on one side pulling up to a gas tank and then a Tesla coming into some sort of vague opening in the floor.
00:18:32.240And the idea is that you can swap out a Tesla battery faster than you can fill up a BMW with gas.
00:19:08.000And when it comes out of the factory, it's covered with sealant.
00:19:10.720everybody's scratching their heads. It's like, what's this all about? Well, it turned out he
00:19:14.680was reward hacking a peculiar program in California that said, in effect, if you can
00:19:20.520demonstrate just once, you know, an extraordinary efficiency of electric cars will give you a
00:19:25.740massive subsidy. So he was doing it for the subsidy and it was a con because it didn't
00:19:32.700really intend to do it. He just intended to satisfy the conditions of the subsidy and then move on.
00:19:39.600Yeah, well, so much of the story of Tesla and SpaceX's success is a story of government loans and subsidies, which makes his depredations running Doge all the more hypocritical and galling, which we'll get to.
00:19:56.320But I mean, there, there still is this bit about there being a blurry boundary between faking it until you make it or just, just, um, you know, just being optimistic about your, your own prospects and actual fraudulence, right.
00:20:24.400Which, again, I really had a front row seat for a lot of this. I mean, I saw what he was claiming. I owned a Model S. I saw what it could do. And, you know, I think he's admitted that he's been overly optimistic in the timeframe he's always put out there, you know, perhaps only retrospectively aware of that.
00:20:44.980And you can, there's a lot of footage of him, you know, confidently saying at the end of this year, we'll have full autonomy and it's, it's 2017 or whatever.
00:20:53.040But, um, well, let's just stipulate that at some point, Tesla will get to perfect, whatever there's level five, you know, autonomy in its cars.
00:21:04.620What are you inclined to say about that being a fraud or just a kind of the carnival barker's path to opening a genuinely thrilling carnival?
00:21:16.840Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at SamHarris.org.
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00:21:26.000I think what Elon Musk did at USAID, in that kind of performative cruelty,
00:21:30.420because, you know, he was warned about the effects of this and went ahead and did it anyway.
00:21:34.900And honestly, you can have a debate about whether or not we want foreign aid,
00:21:39.020but it was the instant cutting of it, where they were literally stopping food
00:21:44.080that had already been paid for going to starving children.