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.”
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’.
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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.”
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 the 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.
Musk is Oscar-winning director’ latest exploration into the corrupting influence of power, and follows documentaries such as Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Steve Jobs: TheMan in the Machine, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.
