“Musk” Documentary Suggests DOGE’s Real Purpose Was Something Else Else

Alex Gibney’s documentary “Musk,” which hits theaters nationwide next week, has already been make headlines for the alarming texts its billionaire subject sent to a romantic partner, former right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair.

St. Clair, who participated in the film, revealed that Elon Musk told him shortly before Election Day 2024 that he was feeling “optimistic” because “tomorrow we will unleash the anomaly in the Matrix.”

When asked what he meant, Musk referred to “lasers from space,” saying, “I have over 10,000 lasers in space right now. »

Did Musk interfere in the 2024 election? Gibney was careful to note that he can’t say whether Musk was bragging to a romantic partner or lying. At a screening of the new film Friday, the director said the texts to St. Clair seemed like a pretty important detail to include. He also shared his theory on what Musk was actually talking about.

“If I had to take a guess,” Gibney said, “it didn’t have to do with the vote switching, it had to do with the vote reporting, and he knew that earlier than anyone because, you know, outside of voting systems, there are things that show up on the Internet, and if you know how to hack them, you can get real-time data.”

“So if I had to take a guess, it would be this.”

Other questions the film leaves unanswered are even more troubling, including whether Musk had private reasons for his involvement in President Donald Trump’s high-profile Department of Government Effectiveness, or DOGE.

“Musk” guides viewers through the evolution of an ambitious businessman whose success was born from his legitimate ability to speak the languages ​​of engineering and management as head of electric car maker Tesla, rocket launcher SpaceX and other high-tech companies.

A hyperrealistic deepfake Musk — albeit with a cartoonishly enlarged head — addresses viewers at numerous points in the film, delivering lines in what appears to be Musk’s own voice. The fake Musk then racks up points by aiming for bigger and bigger targets in the first-person shooter that is his own life, ultimately culminating in his rampage through the US government.

Gibney devotes most of his time to Elon Musk’s penchant for overselling his products, particularly Tesla’s self-driving feature, which has led to a slew of accidents and lawsuits. The film also says Tesla vehicles lie to their owners and hide their real autonomy estimates and other information.

But it also takes time to discuss Musk’s pronatalist views and the diversity of women who gave birth to his children — or “breeders,” as his ex-wife Justine Musk claims, someone “on Elon’s side” once called these women. Gibney introduces viewers to Errol Musk, the billionaire’s father, who tells a bizarre story about his son’s failure to react when he saw a family friend collapse and die in front of him, choosing instead to read a comic book. Musk’s far-right political shift appears to be accelerating amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Its four-hour running time may feel like a chore, but there’s more than enough material in “Musk” to fill it — so much so that Gibney might leave out controversies as bizarre as Musk’s involvement in the Thai cave rescue and anecdotes as humiliating as the time Musk would have been shipwrecked his $1 million McLaren with Peter Thiel in the passenger seat.

In the film, Musk is both an eccentric who has had a real impact on science and technology and a deeply flawed human being who longs to be admired as he accumulates power and influence through extremely questionable means. He’s really good at driving up the stock prices of his companies.

In the end, Gibney leaves viewers wondering how far Musk will go to achieve his ends: could he, for example, use artificial intelligence to interfere in the next midterm elections?

Musk of course operates the artificial intelligence company xAI and its chatbot, Grok, which was integrated into Pentagon systems this year.

Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI,” says in the documentary that it seems “clear” to him that Trump, for his part, is “determined” to disrupt the midterm elections.

Musk and Trump had some fun after their argument over Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” which increased the federal deficit even as Musk was tasked with reducing it, as the documentary points out.

It also takes time to think about the capabilities of the DOGE staff – a team of young men who finished their education around age 25 and who seemed uninterested in spending time learning about the vast government systems they were charged with streamlining, ostensibly to combat “waste, fraud and abuse” of federal taxpayer dollars.

DOGE ended up erratically hitting the federal workforce, shutting down critical scientific research, slashing the National Weather Service, and dismantling USAID, leaving rations that could have fed 3.5 million people to rot in warehouses.

After Friday’s screening, Gibney noted that it was “uncomfortable” that “one of the things we know about DOGE is that these kids knew almost nothing about the agencies that they went into.”

“But they knew a lot about how to access the data. And within a day or two of getting into these agencies, they had what’s called ‘super administrator’ status, and they could access the data in these silos that have classified information, that have all kinds of personal information about us. And that’s never happened before, to have that kind of access across the federal government,” Gibney said.

Journalists documented DOGE’s smash-and-grab approach, and whistleblowers reported it along the way. But privacy advocates have has long feared that a superdatabase of information from separate federal agencies could fall in the wrong hands.

“One troubling aspect of DOGE’s tenure,” executive producer Ronan Farrow said Friday, “is that there remain truly unanswered questions about what happened to Americans’ private and sensitive data – Social Security numbers, phone numbers, addresses, the list goes on and on. This is the kind of information that was harvested, exfiltrated, given to a third party, and we don’t know exactly what happened to it from there, or who all the players were involved.”

“This is the kind of information that can be very sensitive in many ways, but one of them is from an electoral perspective,” Farrow said.

“There’s kind of a harmony… towards the end of the movie, with the data that they’re accessing from DOGE,” Gibney said, adding, “which may indeed be, you know, training data for the AI ​​to interfere with the midterm elections that we’re about to get into.”

HuffPost has reached out to a lawyer for Musk for comment.

In the film, St. Clair voices his own questions.

“What is Elon building? What are his goals?” she asks.

At another point, she makes a blunt statement: “Elon is a nuclear weapon.”

Musk fought for the film, blocking “Musk” ads from appearing on X and pressuring other social platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, to show them as well. (Gibney said Friday that the ads were blocked because they supposedly fell into the category of “political advertising.”)

He engaged in name-calling with Gibney over X, claiming the director “is a fool at heart” with a “bias” against him.

“Musk” is scheduled to premiere in January on HBO, the channel that has just become part of the Ellison family media empire. The Ellisons, Trump allies. Trump, who sympathized with Musk.

Asked about the chances of his film actually airing on HBO, Gibney shrugged.

“We’ll see,” he said.