Elon Musk's cryptic 'anomaly in the matrix' texts revealed in new Alex Gibney documentary
Key Takeaways
- •A forthcoming documentary by Alex Gibney reveals Elon Musk sent messages about an "anomaly in the Matrix" and "ten thousand lasers in space" before the 2024 election, per The Hollywood Reporter.
- •Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk's children, said in the film that Musk displayed an unprecedented degree of certainty about the election outcome beforehand.
- •The documentary presents no evidence that Musk manipulated election results, and the director leaves viewers to judge whether the messages were trolling or something more.
- •Gibney alleges DOGE personnel held Super Admin status across federal IT systems during Musk's tenure at the Department of Government Efficiency.
- •Gibney said DOGE staff could have copied sensitive data on millions of Americans to SpaceX as easily as moving a file into a folder, though what was done with the data remains unknown.
Elon Musk reportedly sent cryptic messages about an "anomaly in the Matrix" and thousands of "lasers in space" in the period before Donald Trump won the 2024 election.
The messages appear in an upcoming documentary titled "Musk" from filmmaker Alex Gibney, according to a new report in The Hollywood Reporter, which viewed a preview of the film. Gibney is an established documentarian known for examining powerful figures and institutions in films such as "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," "Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief," and "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley," which profiled Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. In the documentary, Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk's children, said the tech billionaire displayed a "degree of certainty" about the election before results came in that "I had never seen before."
"He had told me [before the election] he was going to unleash the 'anomaly in the matrix,'" St. Clair says in the film. A text exchange between the two then appears on screen, in which Musk tells her, "I have ten thousand lasers in space."
"I mean, I don't know where else he has space lasers," St. Clair replied after Gibney, asking from off camera, questioned whether Musk was referring to Starlink. Starlink, Musk's satellite internet service operated by SpaceX, maintains a constellation of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit — a scale that makes the reference a plausible, if unverifiable, point of comparison.
The Hollywood Reporter noted that the director leaves it to viewers to decide whether the messages amounted to "a troll or a confession."
While the film does not present evidence that Musk manipulated election results, it offers a second revelation concerning his brief stint at President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): the potential collection of sensitive information on millions of Americans. DOGE, created by executive order early in Trump's second term, tasked teams with cutting federal spending and restructuring agencies, a mandate that gave its personnel unusually broad reach across government systems and made it a sustained focus of congressional and litigation scrutiny over access to agency data.
"We don't know what DOGE/Musk did with the data to which they had access," Gibney told the outlet. "What we do know — via my own source who ran IT at a major federal agency and via the whistleblowers and public accounts — is that the DOGE Boys had Super Admin status to federal IT systems."
He added that this meant DOGE staffers could essentially "slide a copy of the data on all of us to SpaceX as easily as dropping a file into a folder."
