Elon Musk Threatens Defamation Suit Over Alex Gibney Documentary

Elon Musk threatened a defamation suit over Alex Gibney's new documentary, even though the Oscar-winning director says Musk was repeatedly invited to participate and never engaged with the filmmakers.

Speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday, Gibney said his team made multiple attempts to contact Musk during production of Musk, the nearly four-hour documentary that premiered earlier this month at the Venice Film Festival.

"I reached out immediately," Gibney said after Musk's attorney sent a warning letter ahead of the film's October theatrical release. "But he clearly wasn't interested in talking."

Musk instead attacked the documentary on X, calling Gibney a filmmaker with "zero integrity" and dismissing several interview subjects as people who either dislike him or do not know him well enough to be credible.

The dispute escalated when attorney Alex Spiro sent Gibney's Jigsaw Productions a letter warning that Musk could pursue a defamation claim over the film.

The legal threat centers on a section of Gibney's documentary, Musk, involving Ashley St. Clair, a former MAGA-aligned influencer who has a child with Elon Musk and shared private messages he sent her before the 2024 presidential election.

In one exchange included in the film, Elon Musk told St. Clair that "tomorrow we will unleash the anomaly in the matrix." When she asked what he meant, he referred to "'Lasers' from space" and said he had more than 10,000 lasers in orbit.

Spiro argues that the film uses the exchange in a way that could suggest Musk was referring to an unsubstantiated theory that Starlink satellites manipulated election results. According to the attorney, Musk was referring to laser links that allow Starlink satellites to communicate with one another.

"You are therefore on notice, before release, that the insinuation is false, that the material refuting it is public, and that you chose not to be told the rest," Spiro wrote.

The claim that Starlink altered vote counts in the 2024 election has not been substantiated.

Gibney disputes the suggestion that the filmmakers avoided Musk's explanation, saying his team repeatedly sought Musk's participation before the film was completed.

Jigsaw has also defended the documentary on First Amendment grounds, saying filmmakers have the right to conduct "fact-based examinations of powerful public figures."

The company pointedly invoked Musk's own description of himself as a "free speech absolutist," arguing that those protections should also extend to criticism of him.

Gibney said the film underwent legal review and independent fact-checking before its release.

If Musk follows through with a lawsuit in the United States, he would face the higher defamation standard applied to public figures. He would generally need to show that a challenged factual statement was false and that the filmmakers published it knowing it was false or with reckless disregard for the truth. The warning letter itself would not establish that standard.

The documentary has also become entangled in a separate concern for Gibney as it moves toward HBO Max.

Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, is the target of Paramount Skydance's proposed acquisition. David Ellison controls Paramount Skydance, while his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, appears in Musk and helped finance Musk's 2022 purchase of Twitter, now X.

Gibney said HBO has not pressured him over the film, but he remains concerned about what greater media consolidation could mean for documentaries scrutinizing powerful people.

"It's a great concern," Gibney said, citing what he described as an increasingly concentrated media industry.

Musk's lawyer has threatened a defamation suit, but no case has been filed. Musk is scheduled for theatrical release in October before heading to HBO Max.