Does Elon Musk, who claims to be so smart that chess bores him, understand what the Streisand effect is? We’re skeptical, because he’s now threatening to sue the Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney over his new documentary about the controversial business magnate — which Musk has been fuming is a “hit piece.”
The film, simply titled “Musk,” is a four hour examination of the centibillionaire’s life, from his upbringing in South Africa to his start during the dot-com boom to his foray into politics. But it’s a documentary, not a hagiography, and Musk can’t stand that it’s taking a critical eye to his character.
In a letter sent to Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro accused the director of defamation, alleging that his film spreads false claims about Musk supposedly rigging the 2024 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. (“Rigging” probably goes too far, but Musk did shell out nearly $300 million to back Trump’s election campaign.)
The complaint stems from a scene showing Ashley St. Clair — a former right-wing influencer who secretly had a child with Musk but fell out with him after going public about their affair — describing texts she received from Musk in which he cryptically says he’s “optimistic” about Trump winning because “tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.” Musk, attempting to clarify, added in a follow up message that he has “over 10 thousand lasers in space.” (NPR reported that it obtained and authenticated the texts in question.)
Spiro argues that this amounts to defamation, because it promotes a debunked conspiracy theory that Musk used his Starlink satellites to beam in votes for Trump.
“You are therefore on notice, before release, that the insinuation is false, that the material refuting it is public, and that you chose not to be told the rest,” he wrote in the strongly-worded letter.
Musk has had a bone to pick with Gibney ever since the film was announced in 2023, when he instinctively called it a “hit piece” despite there barely being any details about it at the time. Gibney retorted to Musk: “How would you know?”
Evidently, Musk still hasn’t gotten over it. As the documentary neared its world premier at Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, Musk reignited his attacks, making at least five different posts on X deriding it.
“Alex Gibney is obviously going to make the most convincingly terrible hit piece on me that he can possibly think of,” he wrote in one of his paranoid rants. “He’s a douchebag to his core and, in his own words, incredibly biased against me.”
Musk has a well known proclivity for trying to silence his critics, but the odds of his lawsuit working out aren’t spectacular. Defamation, in the US, is infamously difficult to prove.
St. Clair certainly doesn’t appeared to be rattled either, calling Musk’s legal threats “a joke.”
“They are more likely to colonize Mars than win a defamation case against Alex Gibney,” she told NPR in a statement. “Alex Spiro is sending fairy dust letters with obtuse legalese.”
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