Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, says in a new documentary that Musk acted oddly certain about the 2024 presidential election before a single result came in. She describes a “degree of certainty” about who would win that “I had never seen before.”
The movie is called Musk, and it comes from Alex Gibney, the veteran documentary maker who has previously gone after Scientology, Enron, the U.S. military and the Catholic Church. It premieres at the Venice Film Festival on September 8 and reaches American theaters on October 16. St. Clair, 28, is one of its central voices, and her account of that November night is the piece everyone latched onto first.
The film puts a text exchange between the two of them up on screen. St. Clair says Musk, 55, told her before the vote that he planned to unleash the “anomaly in the matrix.” One message reads, “I have ten thousand lasers in space.” When Gibney asks off-camera whether Musk meant Starlink, his satellite internet network, St. Clair replies, “I mean, I don’t know where else he has space lasers.”
The film stops short of saying he rigged anything
For all the noise those texts create, the documentary does not claim Starlink altered a single vote. St. Clair says outright that she does not know what Musk meant by any of it. There is no established evidence that Musk manipulated vote counting, and the film treats the exchange as a question rather than a verdict.
Gibney lets the strange moment sit there without resolving it, then narrates over the top of it. “What is Elon building, what are his goals, what are his actual motivations, and do we even know this man at all?” he asks in his familiar voiceover. That is the engine of the whole thing. Not a smoking gun, but a running list of reasons to look harder at a man most people assume they already understand.
Musk has been calling it a hit piece for years
Musk went after the project almost as soon as it was announced in 2023, branding it a hit piece before a frame of it existed. Gibney’s answer was to ask how he could possibly know, since the film was still being made and Musk had refused to take part. “How would you know?” the director shot back.
He renewed the attack in August 2026 as the premiere neared. Musk called it a hit piece again, said Gibney is incapable of making anything else, and mocked the nearly four-hour running time by asking whether the filmmaker was trying to bore audiences to death. Gibney’s reply was that Musk might actually enjoy it, since he is all over the screen despite never once sitting down for an interview.
The whole movie is a man-behind-the-curtain argument
Gibney’s central claim is that Musk is a 21st-century confidence man whose power comes from the stock market and evaporates the moment people see through the sales pitch. In his Venice director’s statement, he says he kept circling Musk’s public image until the “master shot” of the tech visionary started to look like an illusion. He builds that idea around The Wizard of Oz.
“The Great and Terrible Oz kept people in check because they were afraid of his visage that loomed over everybody, and he used that power to exert an enormous amount of control,” Gibney says. “But when a little dog pulled aside the curtain, and you can see a frumpy man operating gears and levers, suddenly he wasn’t so terrible and he wasn’t so great.”
To make that point land, the movie opens up scenes most people never got to see. In one, a bystander calls out “How’s power feeling, Mr. Musk?” as he strides through a Washington building after the inauguration. In another, he sits at a roundtable beaming at his crew of government staffers, most of them in their early 20s, while Fox News host Jesse Watters looks on.
The first half of the film is a pile of specific accusations. Gibney charges that Musk took credit from Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, that he pressured a woman who bore his child into signing an NDA, that he pumped his stock with talk of Mars trips and full self-driving cars that Gibney alleges are responsible for more than 60 deaths, and that monkeys used in Neuralink experiments suffered needlessly. His summary of Musk is a man who is not nearly as good at running companies as he claims, and excellent at selling tall tales.
What DOGE could have done with your data
Musk’s four-month run atop the Department of Government Efficiency in 2025 is credited in the film with cutting around 270,000 federal employees, a fall in the federal payroll that independent tallies put at roughly that size across the whole of 2025, much of it from deferred resignations that took effect after he left. It also gutted foreign aid, with a section on the aid cuts anchored by former USAID chief Samantha Power. The bigger worry in the film is what those young staffers could reach: Social Security records, personnel files, financial systems and other sensitive data on tens of millions of Americans.
In a follow-up email, Gibney wrote that “the DOGE Boys had Super Admin status to federal IT systems. That means they could just slide a copy of the data on all of us to SpaceX as easily as dropping a file into a folder.” The claim lines up with a whistleblower complaint filed by the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer.
Two DOGE team members were later referred for possible Hatch Act violations after a political advocacy group approached them in March 2025 asking them to analyze state voter rolls it had acquired. The government filing did not establish that Social Security data was ever handed over. The film’s larger warning, spelled out across its second half, is that Musk is positioned to help President Trump subvert the coming midterm elections.
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning computer scientist often called the godfather of AI, puts the fear in plain terms on camera. “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he says. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.”
Musk spent big on Trump, then blew up with him
None of this happens in a vacuum. Musk poured more than $290 million into Trump’s last campaign, held town halls in swing states, and ran a daily $1 million giveaway across seven battleground states for voters who signed a petition for a PAC he created. His own lawyer later told a Philadelphia court the winners were preselected, not picked at random. After leaving DOGE he had a loud, public falling-out with Trump, then drifted back toward the MAGA movement he had helped fund.
St. Clair has gone the other direction, publicly turning on the hard right after years of boosting it. Her history with Musk plays out in the open and it is not pretty. He questioned in public whether her second child, Romulus, born in September 2024, was his. After she apologised for her own past anti-transgender activism, he wrote: “I will be filing for full custody today, given her statements implying she might transition a one-year-old boy.” Musk is the father of at least 14 children with four different women. His transgender daughter, Vivian Wilson, is 22.
When you can actually watch it
Gibney has been chasing this story since late 2022. He thought he had finished a two-hour HBO cut in late 2024, then Musk went to Washington and the whole thing ballooned into a six-hour version before being trimmed back. Venice gets a cut running three hours and 45 minutes. Bleecker Street opens it in theaters on October 16, and HBO plans a four-hour version in 2027.
Beyond St. Clair, the film’s interview subjects include Musk’s former wife Justine Musk, journalist Kara Swisher, Eberhard, technology reporter Zoe Schiffer and Hinton. Podcaster Sam Harris, a former friend turned critic, lays out the through-line near the end: “We are living in a world where one person’s psychopathology and neuropsychological dysregulation is translating into massive consequence in our politics, in our economy, in our geopolitics.”
Gibney does not think that language is over the top, and he says as much. “People assume because he’s very rich that he’s not crazy,” he says. “But the terrifying thing might be that he’s crazy and he’s very rich and powerful. That’s the warning bell the film sounds.”
