Gibney documentary alleges Musk showed unusual certainty about 2024 vote

A new documentary about Elon Musk alleges that the billionaire showed unusual certainty about the outcome of the 2024 presidential election before the votes were counted, and that his four months running the government cost-cutting effort DOGE gave him access to data on tens of millions of Americans.

The film, 'Musk,' directed by the Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney, has its world premiere Tuesday, Sept. 8, at the Venice Film Festival and opens in U.S. theaters on Oct. 16. The Hollywood Reporter previewed the film in a cover story published Wednesday, Sept. 2.

Central to the movie is Ashley St. Clair, a former conservative influencer and the mother of one of Musk's children, who has become one of the film's central figures. She describes his mood around Donald Trump's November 2024 win, saying he had a 'degree of certainty' about the results before they arrived that 'I had never seen before.'

A degree of certainty

St. Clair says Musk told her before the vote that he was going to unleash the 'anomaly in the matrix.' The film puts a text exchange on screen to back the account, showing Musk writing, 'I have ten thousand lasers in space.'

Gibney, off camera, asks whether Musk meant Starlink, his satellite internet network. 'I mean, I don't know where else he has space lasers,' she replies. Musk made no secret of his role in 2024, spending more than $290 million to help Trump, hosting town halls in swing states and running a daily $1 million giveaway across seven battleground states for voters who signed a petition backing a political action committee he created. His own lawyer later told a Philadelphia court the winners were preselected rather than chosen at random.

What Musk meant by the message, and whether his apparent certainty signified anything, the film leaves unresolved.

Musk did not sit for an interview, and Gibney says he tried repeatedly to secure his cooperation. Musk instead attacked the project from outside, calling it a 'hit piece' shortly after it was announced in 2023 and again in August 2026. A SpaceX spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

When Gibney first heard the hit-piece label, he replied by asking how Musk could possibly know, since the film was unfinished and Musk had never taken part.

What DOGE could reach

The documentary's forward-looking allegation concerns the Department of Government Efficiency, the short-lived cost-cutting body Musk ran for about four months in 2025. The film says the effort cost 270,000 federal employees their jobs and eliminated billions of dollars in lifesaving aid by defunding the U.S. Agency for International Development, an outcome the movie treats as its most concrete damage. The federal payroll did fall by about that many over 2025, though much of the drop came from deferred resignations that took effect months after Musk left.

Gibney's larger claim is that DOGE was also about information. During Musk's stint in Washington, the film says, his team gained access to intimate records on tens of millions of Americans and could in theory have copied them for later political use. What was done with the data, Gibney says, is not known.

Gibney wrote in a follow-up email that DOGE staff 'had Super Admin status to federal IT systems,' a level of access he said would let them copy government data as easily as moving a file between folders. He rested the account on a source who ran information technology at a major federal agency, along with whistleblower complaints and public reporting.

The characterization has not been independently verified, and the film offers no proof that any records were copied.

The people on camera

Because Musk declined to participate, the film is built from archival footage and interviews with people who have known, worked with or studied him. The Venice Film Festival lists participants including his former wife Justine Musk, St. Clair, the journalist Kara Swisher, the Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, the technology journalist Zoë Schiffer and the artificial-intelligence researcher Geoffrey Hinton.

We are living in a world where one person's psychopathology and neuropsychological dysregulation is translating into massive consequence in our politics, in our economy, in our geopolitics.

Hinton, who won a Nobel Prize and is often called the godfather of AI, makes the sharpest political case. If someone wanted to corrupt the midterm elections using artificial intelligence, he says in the film, they would need detailed information on U.S. citizens, and what DOGE did looked like exactly that.

A long section anchored by Samantha Power, the former USAID administrator, dwells on the aid cuts. The film also weighs Starlink's role in war zones such as Ukraine against NASA's growing reliance on SpaceX, and it questions whether Musk has used X to win favors from world leaders.

A confidence man

Gibney's thesis, set out in his director's notes for Venice, casts Musk as a modern confidence man whose power rests on the stock market and on stories that outrun the products behind them. He likens his vantage point to Toto pulling back the curtain in 'The Wizard of Oz,' exposing an ordinary man working the machinery.

The first half of the film catalogues what Gibney presents as earlier misdeeds. He says Musk took credit from Eberhard, pushed a woman who bore his child to sign a nondisclosure agreement and inflated Tesla's self-driving claims, which Gibney alleges are responsible for more than 60 deaths. Neuralink's experiments on monkeys also appear.

Two years, then two more

Gibney began the project in late 2022 and thought he had finished a two-hour version for HBO in late 2024. Then Musk poured money into Trump's campaign and took over DOGE, and HBO called to say it wanted and would finance more. He kept filming, expanding the movie to a six-hour cut before it was trimmed.

People assume because he's very rich that he's not crazy. But the terrifying thing might be that he's crazy and he's very rich and powerful. That's the warning bell the film sounds.

The film now exists in several lengths, a reflection of how long Gibney chased it. The cut for Venice, Toronto and theaters runs three hours and 45 minutes, while the HBO version, due in 2027, runs four hours. Bleecker Street holds U.S. theatrical rights, and HBO keeps television and streaming.

Musk and St. Clair

Musk and St. Clair have had a bitter, public falling-out. Musk, 55, publicly questioned whether her second child, Romulus, born in September 2024, was his, as she had claimed. St. Clair, 28, has since denounced the hard right after years of promoting its causes.

After St. Clair apologised for her own past anti-transgender activism, Musk said he would file for full custody of Romulus that same day, citing statements he claimed implied she might 'transition a one-year-old boy.' Musk's transgender daughter, Vivian Wilson, is 22. Musk is the father of at least 14 children with four different women.

Musk, the richest person in the world, has not said publicly whether he will address the film's specific claims or take legal action over it.

What comes next

The premiere falls on Sept. 8 in Venice, with Toronto to follow and the Oct. 16 theatrical release through Bleecker Street after that. The four-hour HBO version is scheduled for 2027. Musk has called the film a hit piece and mocked its length; Gibney has said Musk might actually enjoy it, given how much of it he is in.