State handouts, 10,000 lasers – and Trump’s election: six things we learned from the Elon Musk film

State handouts, 10,000 lasers – and Trump’s election: six things we learned from the Elon Musk film. Photograph: Alex Brandon/APState handouts, 10,000 lasers – and Trump’s election: six things we learned from the Elon Musk filmAlex Gibney’s marathon documentary delivers numerous eye-raising insights into the broligarch’s business deals, early idealism and apocalyptic appetite for fathering childrenVeteran documentarian Alex Gibney’s film about the richest broligarch on the planet has been one of the most eagerly anticipated films at the Venice film festival this year.

What happened

Here are six things the film tells us:Musk is a genius – at tricking the government into giving him assistanceAt Maga rallies, Musk has been introduced as “America’s biggest capitalist”, but Gibney reminds us that he’s always been more than happy to go begging to the state for handouts – such as by cosying up to Obama to gain government contracts for SpaceX to launch satellites for Nasa and the military. Musk knew with a disconcerting degree of certainty that Trump would re-electedIn the film, St Clair describes the events of Trump’s election in November 2024.

Gibney doesn’t get to talk to Musk (or Trump) though in the spirit of Musk’s AI interests, he creates a photorealistic CG avatar who mouths all the things the man himself is reported as saying (a rather contrived visual joke, actually, which the film didn’t need). Explore more on these topicsFilmElon MuskDocumentary filmsAlex GibneyDonald TrumpVenice film festivalreviewsShareReuse this contentMost viewedMost viewed Alex Gibney’s marathon documentary delivers numerous eye-raising insights into the broligarch’s business deals, early idealism and apocalyptic appetite for fathering childrenVeteran documentarian Alex Gibney’s film about the richest broligarch on the planet has been one of the most eagerly anticipated films at the Venice film festival this year. The Oscar-winning 72-year-old, who has in previous films taken on the US military, the Catholic church, Vladimir Putin and Scientology, has been investigating the tech tycoon’s ascent and speaking to people in his orbit since late 2022, before his Maga turn and Trump 2. 0. The result clocks in at just under four hours and presents a comprehensive answer to how on earth one man managed to amass so much money and political influence. It is shocking less for any individual new pieces of information Gibney has unearthed than for its totality. Here are six things the film tells us: Continue reading. . .

Skip to main contentSkip to navigation ‘I need to look like an engineer’ … Elon Musk in Alex Gibney’s film. And what Doge did looked like just what you would do. ”Explore more on these topicsVenice film festivalElon MuskDocumentary filmsAlex GibneyFestivalsfeaturesShareReuse this contentMost viewedMost viewed

The wider picture

Photograph: Alex Brandon/APReviewMusk review – epic study of the world’s richest and most banal manVenice film festival: Alex Gibney interviews former colleagues, wives, the trillionaire’s father and a CG avatar in this absorbing documentary‘Elon is a nuke. ” The speaker is Ashley St Clair, a former conservative Maga influencer and one of Elon Musk’s former girlfriends-slash-baby mommas. The Oscar-winning 72-year-old, who has in previous films taken on the US military, the Catholic church, Vladimir Putin and Scientology, has been investigating the tech tycoon’s ascent and speaking to people in his orbit since late 2022, before his Maga turn and Trump 2.

The film zooms in on a Tesla press event in June 2013, where Musk unveiled a new “battery swap” system that promised to remove and replace the drained battery pack of a Model S with a fully charged one in just 90 seconds. Instead, the film-maker suggests that Musk’s over-promise allowed Tesla to get more ZEV credits from the Californian government, which are awarded to electric car makers based on range and which Musk could then sell to more polluting manufacturers.

In spite of everything, there was something admirable about Musk onceGibney’s film serves as a reminder that Musk has never been in possession of charm or charisma – the petulant perma-poster retweeting praise is not far from the self-regarding twentysomething start-up bro. But interviews in the film raise the question of whether Musk is capable of empathy at all. The godfather of AI is worried Musk might rig the next electionGeoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning British-Canadian computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI”, used to be friendly with Musk, but the pair fell out after Hinton declined his offer to join the xAI board.

In the film, he makes clear that he does not trust Musk to weigh up the risks and benefits of AI responsibly, and there’s more.

What has been reported

“It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” Hinton says onscreen. Skip to main contentSkip to navigation Charmless … Musk at a Trump campaign event in 2024. Photograph: Alex Brandon/APView image in fullscreenCharmless … Musk at a Trump campaign event in 2024. She is a fascinating expert witness in Alex Gibney’s four-hour epic study of the world’s richest and dullest man: the overgrown brattish South-African-born trillionaire plutocrat, ersatz visionary and Trump courtier who owns Tesla cars, SpaceX rocket ships, Starlink satellites on which nation states’ military capabilities are increasingly reliant, X (formerly Twitter) which shapes the collective “incel” id of billions and GrokAI whose vast server farms daily guzzle oceans of precious water.

But given Musk’s boyish love of space travel and sci-fi, Gibney wittily compares him to the hero of the 1936 film version of HG Wells’s The Man Who Could Work Miracles about godlike space aliens who capriciously confer supernatural powers on a banal, ordinary earthling. He speaks to many professional colleagues, and to Musk’s formidably opinionated father Errol Musk who fills us in on Elon’s formative years in the tense world of South Africa in which young Musk was bullied and beaten up.

Gibney speaks to Musk’s first wife Justine Musk (née Wilson), a passionate and intelligent woman who tells us about the tragedy of one of their infant children dying of Sids and then the hurt she felt when Elon felt the need to grandstand about this on social media, claiming the child had died in his arms (it was her arms, she says). All this changed when Joe Biden seemed to be casting a cold eye on Musk’s businesses, and Musk went all in on promoting Trump 2.

What happens next

Unlike these illusionists Musk does have actual palpable success, with Tesla being a long-standing profitable company and Space X, among other things inventing successful re-usable rockets, allied with a skill they don’t have in moving on from commodity to commodity, while controlling the means of production in social media and cultivating the presidency. Where others turned to venture capital, Musk turned to engineering. But in footage of Musk biting his nails with fellow engineers during SpaceX rocket launches his enthusiasm and emotional investment is genuine, and at times infectious.

Musk’s procreation drive is motivated by a fear of civilisational breakdownMusk has 14 publicly known children, and sources tell Gibney that there are probably more. In a text message to one of his ex-partners, influencer Ashley St Clair, Musk said his desire to have “a legion of children” was driven by a fear of “civil war”. The documentary mostly places the roots of that fear in his South African childhood (in one scene, his father Errol Musk talks with no visible remorse of shooting three intruders in their home).

“He’s now playing out the trauma on the rest of us. ” But, oddly for a man who was long a prominent atheist, the film also hints at a religious dimension to his vision of the apocalypse.

The report has been compiled by The Daily Waves using information reported across theguardian.com. Details are presented according to the information available at the time of publication and may change as authorities, organisers or other relevant parties provide updates.