They Tried To BAN This Elon MUSK Documentary Trailer

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Elon Musk is one of the most controversial figures in the world.

Alex Gibney (0:05)

So I decided to make him the subject of my next film.

John Johnston (0:15)

Hi everyone, JJ here. Welcome back to The Lounge. Well, I haven't made a video for almost a week. Some offline important things have been taking my attention. Hey, it does happen sometimes, but I'm back and I just want to report on this MUSK documentary, the ongoing drama. Promise I will get to other subjects again, the stuff going on with the AI bubble as well and other things too. But I did want to get to this because this has been happening over the past few days. It's kind of the Streisand effect if you know what that is, where if you protest about something, if you draw attention to something in a negative way, it actually makes people want to see it more and that seems to be what's happening. I think this documentary, this MUSK documentary by Alex Gibney, Oscar-winning documentary maker, is going to be a blockbuster when it comes out.

And this headline says from The Hollywood Reporter, the major social media platforms are all rejecting paid ads for Alex Gibney's MUSK.

YouTube, TikTok and Meta have all turned down the trailer for the October 9th documentary citing political content.

X won't even take Bleecker Street's calls. The distributor is appealing. Okay, so you might know about this. You might have seen it. So it's moved on from there where they are now going to do this. But this is obviously drawn attention to it. This is some of the attention from Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller for the Trump administration. And it's this headline about the platforms, the major social media platforms rejecting the trailer ad for political content, which is kind of ridiculous. There's some campaign rallies in there where Musk was with Trump and so forth. But I mean, it was a pretty thin justification. But of course, I took this opportunity to post the Musk trailer beneath this. The stress and effect. I mean, people want to see it. And I said, don't worry, content creators will spread it well enough unless of course the platform suppress it.

Surely, free speech absolutist. Elon wouldn't do that right. I understand that X is rejecting the ad. Yes, it's funny that he's such a free speech absolutist, but is definitely against this film. But what happened was the reversal. The Hollywood Reporter again, YouTube and Meta reverse course will accept Musk's trailer ad. I'm going to show this trailer. Of course, as I said, content creators spreading it. I'm going to show this at the end. It's the full trailer, not the teaser, which I've shown before, but the full trailer. Maybe pressure being applied for these platforms not to take advertising for this trailer. The Google unit says the ad was temporarily restricted while Meta calls it an error. TikTok and X remain silent. So the Ellisons have a lot to do with the TikTok ownership at this point. Friend of Elon, so it's not really surprising. It's got a kind of hard right influence there and so is X, of course, being Elon's propaganda platform. Following an outcry over potential suppression, YouTube and Meta are changing direction on the ad for the Elon Musk documentary. I wonder if it will show during my video about this on any of the platforms. Bleecker Street, the studio behind Alex Gibney's upcoming Musk, will be allowed to buy an ad for the trailer on the platform. After all, a YouTube spokesperson tells The Hollywood Reporter, the trailer was temporarily restricted by our system.

Following review, the ad has been cleared to run, the company said, also posting the message to social media. Meanwhile, a Meta spokesperson tells The Hollywood Reporter that a decision to reject the ad was an error, a temporary error, nothing to do with articles like this pressuring them to actually do it, hoping that it may be buried. Elon definitely hoping that it would be buried, right? They may be calling in some favors there. I don't know. We just have to guess on this. Alex Gibney says about the documentary itself, go AMC, let people see the film that tech oligarchs don't want you to see. AMC versus Elon Musk, world's largest movie theater company to show film billionaire wants to disappear. So that's good to see AMC look out for that. Yes, it's going to be starting, I think, October the 9th, starting to be released in the US and world wide HBO streaming platform after that. So yes, I think this is going to be a blockbuster and Elon Musk will hate it. And so this too, I was really happy to see this.