Musk documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney responded Sunday to a documentary legal threat from Elon Musk.
“I reached out immediately… But he clearly wasn’t interested in talking. We made so many formal outreaches to him, and with the exception of his remarks on Twitter, we received nothing back,” Gibney said during a keynote conversation in Toronto.
The veteran doc maker said Musk was heavily lawyered and independently fact-checked, so he’s confident about the veracity of his account of the tech billionaire. But he told the TIFF audience he has “great concern” that Musk will be widely seen as HBO Max, which picked up the title is the subject of an ongoing takeover of Warner Bros. Discover by Paramount, which is led by tech barons like Musk.
Bleecker Street is set to theatrically release the near-four hour documentary in October and HBO Max is set to stream the film as the WBD takeover remains the subject of political and regulatory pressures. “I do worry about the storm clouds on the horizon and the fact that they (HBO) are in the midst of a takeover battle by Paramount. Larry Ellison, who is cited in the film, is one of Elon’s friends and one of the investors in his takeover of Twitter. And his son David Ellison has shown he’ll twist whatever facts are at his disposal in order to please the Capo dei Capi who happens to be the President of the United States,” Gibney said.
“So that is a deep concern. But so far, so good,” he added. Gibney expects Musk to land on HBO Max later this year or early next year. “It’s a great concern and the consolidation of the media and also the aggressive editorial takeover of the media by the tech barons is really deeply concerning,” he argued.
Gibney’s comments follow the Musk film world premiering in Venice before shifting to TIFF for a North American bow on Monday. The world premiere was followed by attorney Alex Spiro, acting for Musk, sending Gibney and his production team a letter, alleging they had misrepresented facts about the tech mogul.
And Musk himself blasted the film as a “boring … hit piece” on X. The letter — confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter — focuses on what Spiro says is an insinuation in the film that Musk used his Starlink satellites to somehow influence the 2024 presidential election to boost Donald Trump.
Earlier, Jigsaw Productions issued a statement after receiving Spiro’s letter: “Alex Gibney’s films are consistently recognized for their in-depth, fact-driven explorations of influential figures and corporations, coupled with his bold and engaging directorial style. This approach has garnered him international praise, an Academy Award among other accolades, and a reputation that The Times of London recently lauded as the ‘gold standard for fearless journalistic integrity.’ The right to engage in open debate and fact-based examinations of powerful public figures is protected by the First Amendment — something that should be recognized and defended by all Americans, including the associates of Elon Musk, who has proclaimed himself to be a ‘free speech absolutist.’”
Musk is Gibney’s most recent film and follows a career making documentaries that investigate powerful institutions and individuals. In Musk, Gibney looks at the tech mogul behind electric cars, space travel, social media, AI, and more.
During his keynote, Gibney discussed Elon Musk’s infamous DOGE purge and its impact on the independence and financing of USAID, the foreign aid agency. “When you’re into hundreds of thousands of people who are killed by performative cruelty, it’s really a staggering moral stain on Elon Musk and the federal government,” he argued.
Gibney also discussed Musk’s use of stock manipulation, as well as securing government handouts and energy credits, as part of his exploitation of financial markets. “You’ve got a con artist who has put in the White House another con artist, and they just keep running bigger and bigger cons, because there’s no Department of Justice or FBI to tell them to do otherwise,” he told the TIFF audience.
Gibney is also a producer of Edward Said: Between Worlds, a film about the late Edward Said, the Palestinian scholar and which is also screening at the Toronto Film Festival. “I just find him (Said) such a compelling public intellectual at a time when there’s a dearth of public intellectuals who have engagement with such a sense of humanism, and obviously this is one of the great global scandals of this moment, the genocide in Gaza and the horrific things that are happening on the West Bank,” he said.
Gibney’s other films include the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, The Last Gladiators, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, The Armstrong Lie and Citizen K.
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