Megan Garber writes:

In December 2021, Elon Musk sat for an interview with The Babylon Bee, a conservative satire site. Having covered the typical topics (wokeness, free speech, Elizabeth Warren) and finding themselves with a bit more time to fill, the outlet’s then–creative director closed out the chat with a request. “The Babylon Bee is a Christian organization, and we’re a ministry,” he reminded Musk. So “we’re wondering if you could do us a quick solid and accept Jesus as your lord and savior?”

Musk laughed. The others did too. The guys waited for an answer, and Musk, after rambling a bit, gave one. Sure, he replied with a shrug—why not? “If Jesus is saving people,” he said, “I mean, I won’t stand in his way.”

The exchange makes a brief but incredibly effective appearance in Musk, the documentarian Alex Gibney’s new film: Asked for a come-to-Jesus moment, Musk professes his faith in himself. The Musk of 2021 was considerably less consequential than the Musk of today. He had not yet added Twitter—humanity’s “collective consciousness,” he once called it—to his portfolio, nor had he staged his hostile takeover of the United States government or become the world’s first trillionaire. Still, Musk had slightly more reason than most to assume his high status on the cosmic org chart.

Through Tesla and Starlink and SpaceX, his dominion stretched over the heavens and the Earth. Through Neuralink and his assorted experiments with artificial intelligence, Musk was expanding his reach into human hearts and minds. As a media figure, too, he was all but inescapable: a piece of software downloaded into people’s lives whether they had opted in to him or not.

Power, at that sort of scale, changes every equation. It can make hyperbole seem accurate. It can make a man, small and flawed, look like something more: a genius, an idol, an outlet for everyday faith. And the discrepancy between the person Musk is and the figure he claims to be is one of Musk’s running themes. The man sells himself as a savior; many have before. But he is where he is—he is what he is—because so many people have bought into the pitch. Delusions of grandeur are one thing. The real trouble comes when one person’s delusions become other people’s reality.

Musk benefits, appropriately enough, from an exercise in data science. The man himself did not participate; he declined Gibney’s overtures in the most Muskian manner imaginable: through an insult-laden post on X. As a work-around, the director and his team created a database compiling every comment Musk has been recorded making in public. That data set—a galaxy-brained version of Musk—informed their assessment of him and individual moments in the film. Muskisms (about the likelihood that earthly life is a simulation, about the drawbacks of empathy, about humans’ future on Mars) make their way into the proceedings via a computer-generated version of Musk—an animated character who appears where, in a traditional documentary, Gibney might have quoted his subject.

To an extent, the approach turns the tables on Musk. It renders this person who talks fondly of humans’ cyborgian future as a cartoonishly uncanny, flagrantly inhuman presence. But it also highlights his cultural status as a man who is, at this point, something more than just a man. [Continue reading…]

Ashley St. Clair, mother of one of Musk’s children, was interviewed by the New York Times:

Were you at all nervous about participating in the film?

No. I was familiar with some of Alex’s documentary work, like “Going Clear.” I liked that he didn’t have any fear. He has a history of treating facts and narratives with respect.

You’ve seen the film. How did you feel watching it?

What was both validating and terrifying was the way the narratives harmonized. Me, Justine [Wilson, Musk’s first wife], Sam Harris [the New Atheist philosopher] and Geoffrey Hinton [the so-called Godfather of A.I.] — there are so many similarities in our experiences with Elon. I think when you’re able to take people who have never spoken to each other and harmonize a narrative, that is the truth. [Continue reading…]