Alex Gibney Encountered “Tremendous Sense Of Fear” While Researching ‘Musk’; Praises “Brave People” Like Ashley St. Clair For Agreeing To Talk

Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney told a Venice Film Festival press conference on Tuesday that he came up against a “tremendous sense of fear” as he canvassed for interviewees his new bombshell documentary Musk about controversial tech tycoon Elon Musk. “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 are his friends,” he said. “I talked to you know many, many, many, many people who, except for some of the brave people here with me here, declined to speak.” He suggested that the documentary had intersected previous works such as the Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, or his 2019 Elizabeth Holmes exposé The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. Watch on Deadline “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… his story is really the story of an old wine in 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,” said Gibney. Gibney was joined at the press conference by Musk interviewees Ashley St. Clair, Elon Musk’s ex-partner and the mother of one of his children, and journalist and writer Zoë Schiffer, author of the 2024 book ‘Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter’. Asked why the had agreed to participate in the film, St. Clair brought up a previously reported $40M NDA offer she received from Musk after their relationship ended. “When you’re offered something like that, it really causes a debate in your head about what your speech means and how valuable that is, and why do they want to offer me this amount of money to not speak?,” she said. “And I believe Alex spoke to it a little bit about Elon’s unreality, and he does complicated relationships generally, but his most complicated relationship is with the truth. And so, I think most importantly, I want to set the example for my kids that you should never take being materially comfortable over speaking the truth.” Schiffer said her involvement chimed with her own work as a journalist who has covered Musk in depth, suggesting it was easier to find people who would talk further down the chain in “Musk Inc”. “His empire is that he has a lot of loyalty at the upper echelons of his company. He stacks the boards with friends and colleagues, but at the lower levels he doesn’t do a lot to engender a ton of loyalty toward him,” she said. “He treats people pretty harshly, and particularly when he’s coming into a new organization like USDS or Twitter. I think there’s a feeling that it’s a sort of takeover, and people who were there previously feel like something really wrong is happening, and those people were quite quite willing to talk. Overnight the production released a first trailer giving a taste of the film, with soundbites describing Musk as “chaotic”, “capricious” , “manifestly cruel”, “a nuke” and “a “fascist” Musk had yet to respond to the trailer by the time the press conference kicked off at 12.30pm CET (3am PT), having pre-emptively fired off a post on X on about Gibney and the documentary last week. His social posts over the past 24 hour have focused instead on showing support for the victory of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in elections Germany’s eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt over the weekend. A German journalist commented on the fact that AfD politicians had thanked Musk for his supported in the wake of their party’s victory, while had congratulated them, and asked for Gibney’s view on the tech tycoon’s influence on politics outside of the U.S. “I hope I show in the film that he’s involved in right-wing political parties all over the globe, in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in Brazil, in Turkey,” said the director. “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. It’s easier to buy the results you want from 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.”