#497 — The Confidence Man

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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Sam Harris (0:24)

I am here with Alex Gibney. Alex, great to see you again.

Alex Gibney (0:28)

Good to see you, Sam.

Sam Harris (0:29)

Turn the tables on you. Last time you were talking to me, now I'm talking to you.

Alex Gibney (0:33)

Yeah, it's your turn.

Sam Harris (0:35)

So we're going to talk about that project. You have this new documentary on Elon Musk titled Musk, which at the time we release this will be out in theaters everywhere, and then eventually on HBO. I got to think my audience is pretty deeply familiar with your work. You are on the very short, maybe two or three fingered list of most famous documentarians in America at this point. You made Going Clear about Scientology, The Inventor about Elizabeth Holmes, The Armstrong Lie about Lance Armstrong, Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room about Enron, that debacle. You made many other films, but the ones I just mentioned really focus on some very selfish and deluded people creating a fair amount of harm.

That is a theme in your current effort.

Alex Gibney (1:21)

It sounds like a segue. Yeah. It sounds like a segue.

Sam Harris (1:24)

So I've seen the film. You sent me a link to a screener, and it's four hours long.

It's really great, and I can tell you about my experience watching it in a minute. But I have to think it was hard to cut down even to that length, and I'm wondering why you didn't decide to do a 10-part series or a format like that, which would have given you even more time.

Alex Gibney (1:48)

It's a good question.

Ultimately, I think we decided that for all sorts of reasons, that we would explore a theatrical release, a kind of immersion in the theater.

That's the way it was originally planned. And actually, I had a version of the film in the spring of 2024 that was virtually done, a two-hour version we were going to release for the fall festivals. But then Trump was nearly assassinated. Elon Musk hitched his wagon to Trump, and my pals at HBO said, You're not done. Keep going. And so it reminded me a little bit of a comment that it's in the longer version of the film that Elon Musk said. It said, they say, If you're going to hell, keep going. Or if you're going through hell, keep going. So I kept going.

Sam Harris (2:36)

Well, yeah. So that's a very interesting starting point. So you started this film really kind of back in the time where somewhat analogous to Walter Isaacson's biography, right? He wrote this 500, 600-page, essentially a hagiography of Elon, which predates virtually all of the controversy of him lurching into right-wing politics and his misadventures on Twitter.

So things just started to get interesting after you had, in some sense, finished your film. Obviously, you don't totally align with Isaacson's effort. I mean, you were covering the Twitter stuff from the beginning. But what was your perception of Elon when you started the project, and how did that change? I mean, are there really two different Alex Gibneys associated with this project?

Alex Gibney (3:26)

Well, there is a place where I started and there is a place where I ended up. I wouldn't say there are two different Alex Gibneys.

It was interesting, the debate that we had always about Elon was, did he change in some radical way, or did a part of his personality simply become more exaggerated? It was a debate we were constantly having. Because when I entered the story, I owned a Tesla power wall at home, I had Tesla solar panels on my house, and I found him to be a kind of intriguing sort of maverick inventor. Now, he was starting to go off the rails prior to this project starting. There was the pedo guy episode with the diver who's trying to rescue the Thai cave kids.

Twitter hadn't really happened yet, that was 2023 I was intrigued by him, and when I was approached to do a doc about him, I wasn't sure actually I really wanted to do it, but a friend of mine said, no, no, no, you should do it. It's about 21st century power. He was accreting a lot of power even then. He was at the time the richest man in the world. So I dug in and in part because he had a similarity to some of the characters that I had looked at in the past. And so I just thought I'd start and see where the journey took me. I didn't really think it was going to take me here, but it did.