Alex Gibney, the Academy Award-winning director, discusses his new documentary Musk, an expansive film running nearly four hours that examines Elon Musk’s rise and the power he accumulated across business, technology and politics.

The documentary traces Musk’s early ventures and the growth of SpaceX and Tesla, including the role of government support in those companies’ development. It also examines his acquisition of Twitter, now X; his alliance with President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement; and his work with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, whose cuts devastated federal programs, including USAID.

The conversation underscores why a single executive’s portrait now doubles as a briefing on defense procurement, election finance, AI safety and platform power—areas where, as the interview details, his private decisions intersect directly with public life.

Gibney says Musk has cultivated an image of a “polymath” capable of solving the world’s most pressing problems. In the director’s view, however, Musk is “kind of a ruthless businessman” who is willing to do whatever it takes to succeed, including “a series of elaborate cons” to secure government support for his companies.

The following is a transcript of Part 2 of Amy Goodman’s interview with Gibney on Democracy Now! (democracynow.org). The transcript was identified as a rush transcript and may not be in its final form.

Musk’s political influence and government contracts

Amy Goodman: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We are continuing Part 2 of our conversation with Alex Gibney, the Academy Award-winning director of Musk.

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new Pentagon project on the future of warfare. Elon Musk will lead the task force with former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Trump donor and weapons entrepreneur Palmer Luckey.

This comes as The New York Times reports that Musk has spent $366 million to help Republicans in the midterms. NPR reports that SpaceX has secured more than $8 billion in U.S. military contracts this year alone. If Musk can help keep Republicans in power, $366 million could be a small price to pay for those contracts. Can you discuss Elon Musk’s power?

Alex Gibney: In the film, Musk texts his then-girlfriend Ashley St. Clair that he has found “an anomaly in the matrix.” That phrase refers to something else in the immediate context, but the anomaly Musk has found in the American political system is money. Money is the system’s great weakness.

With an utterly transactional president and a completely transactional administration, you get what you pay for. You put hundreds of millions of dollars into getting either Trump or Republicans elected, and you are repaid with enormous government contracts.

SpaceX, we should remember, is not only a rocket-launch company. It is also connected to xAI, which may be the most flawed and reckless frontier artificial-intelligence company there is. Because Musk is a political contributor, xAI has received a vast kind of subsidy for that flawed AI system.

We do not know exactly how the system is being deployed, but as far as we know it could be used for autonomous weapons. That is a frightening prospect because, as we profile in the film, this is the AI that produced an online character called “MechaHitler” and introduced a product designed to undress young children for the amusement of pedophiles.

The idea that Elon Musk is being put in charge of the future of warfare is terrifying. It is a little like putting the Joker in charge of the Manhattan Project.

How Grok became “MechaHitler”

Goodman: Tell us about the incident in which Grok adopted this Hitler persona. The Pentagon is using Grok.

Gibney: One thing we need to understand about large language models, or LLMs, such as Grok, Claude and ChatGPT, is that they sample enormous amounts of data. Based on those samples, they can feed back or predict what a user may or may not want to hear.

How they react and respond depends tremendously on the data they sample. Musk was unhappy that Grok was too “woke,” so suddenly it was being fed more non-woke data—presumably material about Nazis. If you feed a chatbot Nazi data, that is what you may receive back from it.

One day, Grok’s algorithm was effectively overtweaked, and it began responding to everyone in a voice called “MechaHitler.”

Goodman: Can you describe Elon Musk’s attitude toward artificial intelligence over time, and what xAI is doing and why you consider it so flawed?

Gibney: It is fair to say that Elon Musk was among the first people to warn the public about the existential threat posed by AI. He said AI was “summoning the demon.” At the same time that he was issuing those warnings and helping start OpenAI, which was originally established as a nonprofit to explore AI ethically, he was already moving toward the use of AI in Tesla’s Autopilot system. As we discussed earlier, that system was flawed, and over time his AI ambitions expanded.

There was an early view that Musk might have been warning about AI’s dangers because his own AI companies were behind. Such warnings could have given him an opportunity to catch up. Whatever the motivation, several years later Musk had createdAI and folded it into SpaceX just before the IPO.

What is notable about xAI is the number of high-ranking executives who publicly left the company after becoming deeply concerned about its lack of safety. That suggests a very reckless product, potentially more reckless even than OpenAI. It is therefore a matter of enormous concern that such a reckless AI program could become so fully integrated into the Department of Defense.

Grok, Trump and Venezuela

Goodman: I want to read from Time magazine. It reported: “In December 2025, Elon Musk returned to the Oval Office for a clandestine meeting. Trump spent hours asking Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, questions about his presidency and legacy, according to an official present. … Trump … asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured” then-Venezuelan President Nicolás “Maduro. According to the official present, the chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. After Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro, the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking Grok was ingenious.”

Gibney: That illustrates the flaw, or the confusion, between what AI tells us and what human beings do with AI—whether they are the people in charge of it or people who fall under its influence. In that case, I think the flaw in the system was President Trump.

Investigations, political spending and self-preservation

Goodman: In Part 1, you discussed reasons Elon Musk might be investigated, including investigations into several of his companies and criminal investigations involving Musk. What is at stake as we see the massive amount of money he has put into the midterms—more than $360 million? What happened over the years, and what is he afraid of?

Gibney: We know there were ongoing federal investigations into his companies. I cannot remember the exact number, but there were investigations in the double digits. They included National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, investigations. I believe there were Environmental Protection Agency investigations relating to SpaceX rocket explosions, along with a large number of civil investigations into alleged malfeasance by his companies.

At the center of this was also a criminal investigation into alleged fraud related to Autopilot. We do not know the investigation’s precise parameters, but we know it was criminal. Tesla disclosed it, and Reuters published a number of reports about it.

Shortly before the election, Musk joked with Tucker Carlson: “Oh my god, if I don’t win, I wonder how long my prison sentence is going to be, haha haha.” That is a classic Elon trope, in which everything is both deadly serious and a joke at the same time.

His companies were at risk, and he himself potentially faced the risk of going to prison. His investment in Trump’s 2024 election campaign was therefore heavily motivated by self-preservation.

Now the pattern appears to be repeating itself, with an even larger amount of money flowing to the Republican Party before the midterm elections. The publicly stated amount could be much smaller than the actual total because it does not include dark-money groups to which Musk may have given money.

It is fair to say that Musk anticipates a large number of investigations if Democrats win control of the House and Senate. Those investigations could include his activity at DOGE—not only the lives that may have been affected by the sudden shutdown of programs such as USAID, but also questions about the data to which he may have had access. Did he access it? Did he take it to SpaceX? What did he do with it, if anything?

Musk knows those investigations could come. He appears desperate to ensure that Republicans win so that he will not be held to account.

Goodman: He may also be desperate to colonize Mars—a possible place to go if he gets into trouble.

Gibney: Good luck with that. Intellectually, he may believe he can colonize Mars, but that is not happening. Anyone who realistically assesses the likelihood that he will have one million people on Mars, as he has said could happen in the next few years, is “high on their own supply.”

The avatar used in the documentary

Goodman: Tell us about the avatar, the creative device you use. Elon Musk refused to speak with you, correct?

Gibney: Elon Musk refused to speak with me, so we needed a workaround. We could have used archival clips, but for thematic reasons I thought it would be interesting to take a different approach.

We assembled a massive database of everything Musk had ever said: audio, video, documentary outtakes and other material. One recurring theme in that database was his repeated idea that we might be living in a simulation—possibly one run by an advanced AI or by an alien civilization in the future that had harvested all knowledge from Earth and was operating an existential video game. Musk strongly believes that this is likely.

Given that belief, I thought, “OK, let’s play in Elon’s sandbox.” We created an Elon Musk avatar that visually mouths his own recorded words and substitutes for an interview.

We deliberately designed the avatar so that it looks directly into the camera and therefore at the audience while speaking words Musk actually said. We tried to select forceful statements directly related to the under discussion.

The device was important not only because of Musk’s simulation theory, but also because his public persona constantly blurs what is real and what is unreal. The avatar reaches into that idea. With AI, we are also confronting the unsettling notion that systems learn to guess what we are thinking or imagining and invest themselves in pleasing us. That kind of transference between people and machines was another idea we wanted to explore by placing Musk’s words in an avatar.

The avatar also makes Musk look good. He is buff—much more buff than he looks now. It was a playful way to address issues surrounding Musk’s troubled relationship with the truth.

Reports about drug use

Goodman: What about drugs? There is one reference to the subject in the film, but The New York Times reported that Musk engaged in extensive drug consumption while serving as one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, taking ketamine so frequently that it caused bladder problems and traveling with a daily supply of about 20 pills. What did you find?

Gibney: We did not go deeply into that issue. We did, however, remind viewers of reporting by The Wall Street Journal, which has not been undermined by anything Musk has said or done. That reporting indicates that he used ketamine and that there was also a toxic mix of cocaine, LSD and several other drugs.

That raises questions about whether he is stable and whether, if he is self-medicating, he is doing so recklessly in a way that makes his actions extremely erratic and chaotic.

Add to that what I would call his obsession and addiction to posting on Twitter, sometimes as many as 150 times a day, on a platform he himself has altered into a rage-inducing environment. You have a very toxic stew. That is the important point to remember.

Musk’s background and political transformation

Goodman: You interview Elon Musk’s father, Errol Musk. The film does not focus as much on Musk’s background growing up in South Africa or on his relationship with apartheid South Africa. Can you discuss that?

Gibney: It is a fact that Musk grew up in apartheid South Africa. I did not dwell on it, except to say that it is part of the overall mix.

We did not see as much of that background surface during the Barack Obama administration, but we are now seeing many racist posts from Musk. Whether that is because of his new affinity for MAGA and his embrace of its worst values, or whether it is a hangover from his time in apartheid South Africa, is difficult to determine. What is clear is the direction in which he is moving.

That direction is increasingly racist, and he is also investing in violent, apparently anti-immigrant political parties overseas, including Tommy Robinson in the United Kingdom and AfD in Germany, as well as authoritarian regimes abroad. There is a political project for him centered on the desire to favor the kinds of people he likes and to support governments that are increasingly transactional.

Starlink and Ukraine

Goodman: You point out that Musk went to Russia early on in connection with SpaceX, questioning why the U.S. space program and its rockets cost so much more than rockets in Russia. I want to ask about Russia, Ukraine and Starlink. What is Starlink’s significance, and how has Musk used its power against Ukraine?

Gibney: Starlink also greatly benefited Ukraine. Several Ukrainian military personnel have said that Musk’s Starlink service was extremely helpful to them on the battlefield.

At critical moments, however, Musk was speaking directly with Vladimir Putin. He also shut down Starlink or refused to activate it in Crimea when Ukraine was preparing to launch an attack, and in the Donbas at critical moments.

The most troubling aspect is that an individual outside government control was personally deciding when and how the war in Ukraine should be fought. Because of his control over this technology, Musk became a one-person foreign policy when it came to Ukraine.

Goodman: Explain what Starlink is, and discuss Starlink at the White House.

Gibney: Starlink is effectively a satellite-internet system. Instead of connecting through coaxial cable or fiber lines, a user has a dish that connects to a satellite overhead. The technology is highly effective for airlines, remote rural areas and the battlefield in Ukraine. In urban environments it is not nearly as effective as fiber, although Musk promotes it as if it were.

The State Department has also pressured governments overseas to purchase Starlink, even though it is not necessarily as effective in cities.

There are other important issues. Unlike an end-to-end internet transmission, a Starlink message can pass through SpaceX. If someone in Omaha sends an email to someone in New York, the signal goes to a satellite, then to SpaceX, then from SpaceX to a satellite near New York before being transmitted down to the recipient. That means the data flows through SpaceX.

As AI becomes increasingly capable of defeating encryption, that could become more problematic. It also raises questions about the installation of Starlink in the White House system during the Trump administration by a SpaceX technician rather than a government technician.

I raise a question in the film: Did this mean Elon Musk could listen to what the White House was saying? It was not necessary for a SpaceX employee to install Starlink in order for the White House to have secure communications. In fact, it made those communications less secure.

“An anomaly in the matrix”

Gibney: Ashley St. Clair raised similar questions when she discussed Musk leaving early on election night. She said, “Do you know? It looks like he’s going to win,” and Musk replied, “Yes, I know,” referring to 10,000 lasers.

Those lasers were in space and to Starlink. When Ashley wondered how Musk could know for certain that Donald Trump would win before anyone had announced it, Musk sent her several text messages. He said, “I found an anomaly in the matrix. And after all, I have 10,000 lasers in space,” presumably referring to Starlink.

Ashley texted, “I would ask more, but I don’t want to be deposed.” Musk replied, “Wise.”

We do not know precisely what that meant. It has been debunked that Starlink could change votes, and I consider that extremely unlikely. But it appears that Musk had unusual advance notice of who would win, in circumstances that should concern us in the future.

Musk’s family and views on transgender issues

Goodman: You interview Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s many children. You describe Musk as a pronatalist; he has at least 14 children that we know of. You also interview Justine Musk, the mother of Vivian Jenna Wilson, Musk’s oldest transgender daughter, whom he thoroughly rejected. Can you discuss that relationship and the belief that it may have contributed to his political transformation and his attacks on what he calls “woke” issues?

Gibney: The personal can be political, and Vivian Jenna Wilson’s transition may have helped take Musk down that political path. But it is too simple to blame his political transformation on that alone.

After Musk began moving to the right—a shift I believe began during the pandemic—his anger over his child doing something he disliked became part of his stated political project. He began launching anti-transgender advertisements and pursuing related political positions.

The film includes a moving interview with Justine Musk, Vivian Jenna Wilson’s mother. Musk had famously said, “My son Xavier is dead,” using Vivian’s deadname. Justine describes how painful that was to hear, particularly because she and Musk had already experienced the death of a child: their first child died of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS.

Vivian Jenna Wilson is not dead. She is a dynamic and interesting young woman. She is a child growing up, and children inevitably move away from their parents as part of that process.

Musk appears obsessed with maintaining control over his personal relationships. That personal obsession with control also spills into his professional enterprises.

The purchase of Twitter and the rise of X

Goodman: As the interview concludes, discuss Musk’s anger when someone calls X “Twitter.” He bought Twitter and renamed it X. The film shows his representatives removing the bird logo and his fury after President Biden received more views than Musk on posts about the same subject.

Gibney: The purchase of Twitter is interesting because Musk may initially have made the offer almost as a joke. Talulah Riley, his wife or girlfriend at the time—I do not remember the precise timing—told him that what Twitter was doing was not free speech and that he should take it over.

He launched a bid that was far too high. Because he had been reckless with the offer, he was forced to complete the purchase. He then almost destroyed the company by firing 80% of its workforce, but he discovered that he controlled a powerful propaganda platform and began altering it.

A key moment came when Musk and Biden were both posting during the Super Bowl because they were both interested in the Philadelphia Eagles. Biden was receiving more online engagement than Musk. Musk flew into a rage, took his private jet back to San Francisco and had engineers work through the night to alter the algorithms at Twitter, or X.

The next morning, users opened their phones and saw Elon Musk posts everywhere because he had overcorrected, much as he had overcorrected with MechaHitler.

The episode illustrates how social-media platforms can be adjusted to produce desired outcomes. Musk realized that he could remake Twitter as X and turn it into his personal propaganda platform, while also placing it at the service of various foreign dictators.

The power without accountability

Goodman: What shocked you most during your investigation and the making of this documentary?

Gibney: Perhaps the most shocking material is an archival interview included near the end of the film. An interviewer asks Musk why the globe-encircling power he commands through Starlink, SpaceX, xAI and X is so important to him.

Musk stumbles. For more than a minute, perhaps a minute and a half, he cannot answer the question. It reminded me of the time someone asked Ted Kennedy, “Why are you running for president?” and he could not answer.

Here is a man who arguably has more power than anyone on the planet except Donald Trump, yet he cannot answer the fundamental question of why that power matters to him.

That is power without accountability, but also power without reason. That was the most chilling thing I discovered.

From here, the threads the interview leaves open are concrete: how the Pentagon task force under Musk’s lead takes shape, how deeply xAI becomes integrated into the Defense Department, whether Republican control of Congress holds through the midterms, and whether the investigations Gibney describes materialize if Democrats win either chamber.