MUSK Documentary Maker Has A Brutal Elon Diagnosis

John Johnston (0:30)

Served up by the algorithm, this interview with Alex Gibney, who's the maker of the Musk documentary due out in October in the US and worldwide. Previous video was about the drama over the distribution, Elon not liking it, threatening to sue and so forth. But I think we will get to see it one way or another. And he really says some interesting things about Elon, and kind of a diagnosis of what Elon has become, and talking about the movie as well, what's in it. And it hasn't had enough views. It's an interview with the LA Times. I will want to react to it, and I'll put a link to the full piece. We'll just have a look at some of it.

Alex Gibney (1:11)

With the commercial enterprises that he was putting together between Tesla, his satellite business out of SpaceX and then SpaceX itself, that he was sort of the face of 21st century power in terms of the economic power that he was amassing coming out of Silicon Valley.

John Johnston (1:31)

So that's where my interest lies too. I mean, I started off doing investment videos four years ago, and I started to realize the same thing, which is why I started making videos more about Elon, more about Tesla and what was going on. Over two years, two and a half years that I've been focusing on this as the story has developed and I will be continuing with it obviously.

Where will this go?

Alex Gibney (1:54)

I thought that was interesting. I had no idea how much more power he was going to accrete. I was kind of a fan because I liked him as a kind of almost countercultural character, you know, building from scratch an electric car company to challenge the big three.

And you know, I had a Tesla power wall and solar panels on my house. You know, I liked the mission.

But when you start to do a story about somebody, you start to do research, and I read this book called Ludicrous. It was by a guy named Ed Niedermeyer. And basically, he posited that there was a car called a Tesla that you could buy, but the difference between what it was and what he promised was Ludicrous. And that along the way, he had confected all of these stunts to fake people out and make people think that the company was something that it wasn't in order to get to where he needed to go. So that was interesting.

John Johnston (3:00)

Yeah, that was my realization too over time after looking at this stuff every day. I used to write about it too. I used to write about sustainability and climate tech or what's called clean tech in those days or green tech. And this was my realization over time too. That's why I've become so interested in it and the power situation and the changes that Elon's gone through.

Alex Gibney (3:22)

And that, as it happened, served us well on this project when the project took a dramatic turn into the political realm. Here's a guy who's literally trying to take reality and turn it into a fiction that benefits him because if he's this all-knowing sort of Leonardo da Vinci-like character, then over time, presto chango, you don't have to invest in the economic fundamentals of the company, just invest in him.

John Johnston (3:48)

He talks about it as a fiction, mythologies, Elon's predictions going way back that have become more and more fiction about going to Mars, colonizing Mars, so many things with Tesla and with SpaceX, the self-driving technology, which he talks about in this interview as well, the famous Paint It Black video, which basically was staged.

SPEAKER_3 (4:10)

Is he truly high on his own supply or is he knowingly kind of goosing the markets with this founder stuff?

Alex Gibney (4:21)

I think it exists on a spectrum. I mean, I think at this point, he can stand up and say things and convince himself that, yeah, he's high on his own supply and that it's all true, even though deep down he knows it isn't. I've run across a number of those people. I remember that with Lance Armstrong and the folks at Enron and Elizabeth Holmes.

John Johnston (4:42)

Yes, yeah, I think it's become more over time, more that he doesn't believe everything that he's saying. It's just so much all the time, so many of his predictions, but he probably has convinced himself and he does mention Enron, they're the folks at Enron. So this guy, Alex Gibney, did make a very good documentary about Enron, the fall of Enron, the rise and fall of Enron, which I watched, rewatched last night, 2005 And this will be one of the reasons that Elon is worried about this documentary. And maybe this will be part of the breaking point when this comes out. And he's so high-profile, now this goes back a long way, Oscar-winning documentarian. But I really highly recommend that. It has a lot to teach about the current moment, I think. People forgot about Enron, a lot of people don't know what happened there. But this goes through it step by step. I mean, there's tragedy in it. The path of Enron seems similar in some ways or not exactly, but there is definitely some similarities to be seen. He does talk about how we don't learn, we just repeat or rhyme the mistakes of history.