Director Alex Gibney’s new documentary, Musk, raises questions about Elon Musk’s role in the 2024 election. It also asks what he wanted from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Texts Musk sent shortly before Election Day have become one of the film’s most striking revelations, and Gibney has thoughts about what they mean.
Ashley St. Clair, a former right-wing influencer, was romantically involved with Musk and took part in the film. She says Musk texted her shortly before Election Day 2024, telling her he felt “optimistic” because “tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.” St. Clair asked what he meant. Musk pointed to “lasers from space,” and said, “I have over 10,000 lasers in space right now.”
According to HuffPost, Gibney has been careful to say he cannot tell whether Musk was bragging or lying. At a Friday screening, he still called the texts an important detail to include and offered his thoughts.
“These kids knew next to nothing about the agencies they went into”
“If I was to hazard a guess,” Gibney said, “it had to do with not the switching of votes, but with the reporting of votes, and that he knew sooner than anybody else did because, you know, out of the voting systems, there are things that appear on the internet, and if you know how to hack into them, you can get real-time data.”
The film also looks at the young male staffers Musk brought into government, whose ages reportedly topped out at around 25. Gibney said it was “discomforting” that “one of the things we know about DOGE is that these kids knew next to nothing about the agencies they went into.”
He said they still quickly gained broad access to federal systems. “Within a day or two of entering those agencies, they had what’s called ‘super admin’ status,” Gibney said.
Executive producer Ronan Farrow said there are “genuinely unanswered questions about what happened to the private, sensitive data of Americans.” Fears about DOGE’s handling of personal data did not start with this film. Reporters and whistleblowers have flagged problems, and privacy advocates have long warned about the risks of combining records from separate federal agencies.
Gibney tied that data to the midterms. “There’s a kind of harmony … toward the end of the film, with the data that they access from DOGE,” he said, adding, “which may indeed be, you know, training data for AI to interfere with the midterm elections we’re about to engage in.”
Musk has also fought the film. He barred Musk ads from appearing on X and has reportedly pressured other platforms to block them, too. Gibney said the ads were blocked because they reportedly fell into the category of “political advertising.”
“Musk” is set to stream on HBO in January. The network recently became part of the Ellison family’s media empire, and the Ellisons are allied with President Donald Trump, per HuffPost. Asked whether the film will actually reach HBO, Gibney shrugged and said, “We’ll see.”
Published: Oct 12, 2026 11:45 am