#497 — The Confidence Man

Sam Harris speaks with Alex Gibney about his new documentary, Musk. They discuss Sam's former friendship with Musk, the line between visionary and con man, the myth of Tesla's founding, the staged self-driving video, Musk's lurch to the right, DOGE and the dismantling of USAID, his feud and reconciliation with Trump, Starlink and the war in Ukraine, the case for future investigations, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org. There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  I am here with Alex Gibney. Alex, great to see you again.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  Good to see you, Sam.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  I've turned the tables on you. The last time you were talking to me, now I'm talking to you.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's your turn.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Well, so we're going to talk about that project. You have this new documentary on Elon Musk titled Musk, which at the time we released this will be out in theaters everywhere and then eventually on HBO. I got to think my audience is pretty deeply familiar with your work. You are on the very short, maybe two or three fingered list of most famous documentarians in America at this point. You made Going Clear about Scientology, The Inventor about Elizabeth Holmes, The Armstrong Lie about Lance Armstrong, Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room about Enron, that debacle. Yeah, you made many other films, but the ones I just mentioned really focus on some very selfish and deluded people creating a fair amount of harm. And

• 1:20Speaker 01

  that is, that is a theme in your current effort.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  It sounds like a segue. Yeah, it sounds like a segue.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  So I've seen the film. You sent me a link to a screener and it's four hours long. It's really great. And I can tell you about my experience watching it in a minute, but I have to think it was hard to cut down even to that length. And I'm wondering why you didn't decide to do a 10 part series or a format like that, which would have given you even more time?

• 1:48Speaker 02

  It's a good question. I mean, ultimately, I think we decided that for all sorts of reasons that we'd explore a theatrical release, a kind of immersion in a theater. That's the way it was originally planned. And actually, I had a version of the film in the spring of 2024 that was virtually done, a two hour version. We were going to release for the fall festivals, but then Trump was nearly assassinated. Elon Musk hitched his wagon to Trump and my pals at HBO said, you're not done. Keep going. And so it reminded me a little bit of a comment that it's in the longer version of the film that Elon Musk said. It said, they say, if you're going to hell, keep going, or if you're going through

• 2:33Speaker 02

  hell, keep going. So I kept going.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, so that, that's a very interesting starting point because so you started this film really kind of back in the time where somewhat analogous to Walter Isaacson's biography, right? I mean, he wrote this five, 600 page, essentially a hagiography of Elon, which predates virtually all of the controversy of him lurching into right wing politics and, and his misadventures on Twitter. And so things just started to get interesting after you had, in some sense, finished your film. Obviously, you don't totally align with Isaacson's effort. I mean, you, you were covering the Twitter stuff from the beginning. But what was your perception of Elon when you started the project? And how did that change? I mean, are there really

• 3:21Speaker 01

  two different Alex Gibneys associated with this project?

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Well, there is a place where I started and there is a place where I ended up. I wouldn't say they're two different Alex Gibneys. And it was interesting, the debate that we had always about Elon was, did he change in some radical way? Or did a part of his personality simply become more exaggerated? It was a debate we were constantly having. Because when I entered the story, you know, I owned a Tesla power wall at home. I had Tesla solar panels on my house. And I found him to be a kind of intriguing sort of maverick inventor. Now, he was starting to go off the rails, you know, prior to this project starting, you know, there was the pedo guy episode with the, with the diver who's trying to rescue

• 4:09Speaker 02

  the Thai cave kids and, and Twitter. Well, Twitter hadn't really happened yet. That was 2023. So I was intrigued by him. And when I was approached to do a doc about him, I wasn't sure, actually, I really wanted to do it. But a friend of mine said, no, no, no, you should do it. It's about 21st century power. And he was accreting a lot of power even then. He's still, he was at the time, the richest man in the world. So I dug in and in part because he had a similarity to some of the characters that I had looked at in the past. And so I just thought I'd start and see where the journey took me. I didn't really think it was going to take me here, but it did.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, I found the, the experience watching it a little disorienting because you cover, you know, all of the, the years of his public life, really, and, and some considerable portion of that period, I was friends with him. But I wasn't, and I should say, if I haven't already, that you interviewed me for the film. And so I'm in there to some extent. And I think when, when you interviewed me at the time, I was more on the side of thinking that Twitter and his, you know, his engagement with his own algorithm and kind of growing fame and wealth and power had deranged him more than revealed him,

• 5:29Speaker 01

  right? Because I find this guy unrecognizable. But in watching your film, so much of the footage is contemporaneous with my friendship with him. And I realized I wasn't watching most of his press coverage at all. I mean, so I was, I was having a private experience with the guy, but I wasn't seeing so much how he was showing up in public. And I certainly didn't see him in all of his roles in life, right? So I was, I was not seeing him as a bully and a narcissist and a, a fame and power seeking, you know, monster of any kind, really. And, and yet some of that evidence was available, had I been watching the footage

• 6:12Speaker 01

  that was, is in your film. And I want to go into, I mean, I certainly want to go in, I want to be as fair as, as we can be to Elon here. And I want to explore, you know, whether you're as fair as you, as you should be in your, in your film.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  But before we dive into it, what's been the experience of making the film and releasing the film and dealing with any pushback from Elon? Has this been a kind of a standard documentarian's story? Or has this been, been an unusual experience for you?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Well, it's been both unusual and to some extent, par for the course. I mean, there are a lot of films I started where I didn't have access to the central subject, even though they were the central subject. Elizabeth Holmes never sat down for an interview with me. I found a workaround in that case. You know, in the case of Lance Armstrong and Elliot Spitzer, I spent a lot of time with them. The Enron guys never sat down with me, though I did get some high ranking Enron executives. So that aspect was always a little, you never exactly know how it's going to work out. I had some exchanges with Julian Assange, but he never agreed to a sit down interview. The thing that was odd about this one was, you know, there was a producer on my team, Jesse Dieter, who had worked on

• 7:26Speaker 02

  two docs with Elon. And so we had an actual entree to him. And Jesse wrote him a number of, of letters, you know, that were convivial and urged him. But his exchange with me was very frontal. And it was, you know, I mean, it's chronicled in the film, but his response to our entreaties was to go on Twitter and say, Gibney is a douche.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  And this was just at the first mention that you were making the film in the first place, the first time around?

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Not exactly. There had been an earlier mention of it where he said it was a hit piece, but this was a second mention, I think accompanied by our, you know, invitation. Because of course I wanted him to be interviewed. That was my initial instinct. So, yeah, but it was early. And, and I was guessing at that point that I probably wasn't going to get the interview with Elon that I had hoped for. So I just tweeted back, douche. And that was the end of our exchange. And then, you know, I faced a bigger problem, which is how do you get to the heart of a portrait of a person without the central person participating? But I'd been there before, so I just had to go through the journey and see how it turned out.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Were there people who had a lot to say, but weren't willing to go on camera to say those things?

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Yes. And a lot of them either were close to Elon and didn't get his permission, or there were people who knew Elon reasonably well from a workplace standpoint. Some were inclined toward him, some weren't. But they were all terrified of appearing on screen because they were afraid that Elon might sue them, or there would be other professional repercussions. And I think also, among the higher echelons of either Silicon Valley investors or executives, you know, there's kind of a club. You don't speak out against other people. The one exception to that rule appears in the film, Reid Hoffman. But that was kind of like, I'll talk to you off the record or on background. And some of

• 9:27Speaker 02

  the, some of that conversation was useful. But I found it particularly for the men who always like to be big swaggering characters in real life or in public life, you know, when it came to appearing on this documentary, shriveled into the shadows.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Right. So did you reach out? I mean, so I guess since Elon took the position that the film was going to be a hit piece early on, no one who would, who still counts themselves among his friend group would be inclined to have, have sat down with you because they would feel they were betraying a friend there, even just to sing his praises in that context.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I found that odd. I mean, there was a, one person I'm thinking of in particular I went to who I know rather well, and was friends with Elon. And he said, come on, sit down with me just off the record, you know, because, and tell me how great Elon is, you know, just give me your view, your perspective, so that it's something that I can take into account. He said, I would never betray a friend like that. I thought that, it seems odd. Like, why would you, why would you take that stance? Why wouldn't you? Stick up for your friend by telling me how great he was, but he refused to talk to me.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Well, you essentially make the case in the film that Elon is a con man of sorts. I mean, he's not, he's by no means a standard con man because he accomplishes so much. I mean, so if you compare him to someone like Elizabeth Holmes, about whom you also made a film. In that case, I mean, it's still not entirely clear to me just how fully she was a fraud. I mean, I have to think in the very beginning, she demonstrated enough understanding of the relevant biology so as to entice her professors at Stanford to, to support her. But it did seem that in the end she had this black box that was not doing much of anything.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  And it really wasn't.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  It was called the Edison, who, by the way, was a, in his own way, a kind of huckster. You know, though he did really invent stuff, but he did exaggerate his accomplishments a lot.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, but, but so Elizabeth Holmes was, was engaged in the end in a kind of elaborate fraud. I mean, Elon has transformed multiple industries and he's, I mean, you make, you make it clear that he is a self mythologizer and a liar. And we can sort of go through the evidence for all of that as we get deeper into your film. But at a minimum, he is an amazing entrepreneur and industrialist in the sense of being able to recruit brilliant people, you know, mostly engineers, who can really build stuff. And he's, I mean, he transformed the electric car industry and, I mean, resurrected it, or even beyond resurrecting it.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  He transformed it into something that it never was, which is, you know, some of the most desirable cars in the world are now electric because he built them. I mean, he was built, he built a, you know, with the Model S, he built a four door sedan that, that outperformed Lamborghinis and Ferraris on the racetrack, right? So, I mean, that, that was, that was something real. And so it is with, with SpaceX. I mean, he's put more satellites into orbit than the rest of humanity combined, right? So there's, there's some, it's hard to simply call him a fraud. And yet there's so much evidence of fraudulence and deception and dishonesty here. Again, this is something that I've learned only after falling on the wrong side of him

• 13:00Speaker 01

  as a former friend. But how do you resolve that tension as a, as a storyteller?

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Well, you're right that he's not Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes didn't have a product. You know, that box, as we discussed, was, was a joke. And you're right, he, he was a, or is a great industrialist in some ways. I mean, you know, let's acknowledge some of his superpowers. You know, he had extraordinary determination to succeed. He put his money where his mouth was. He turned out to be an incredible money raiser. Now, later on, when we get to the other side, I'll describe some of the fraudulent ways he raised money, but he really did raise a lot of money. And also, at both of those key companies, Tesla and SpaceX, he created a sense of mission that I think did attract an extraordinary number of very talented engineers and executives.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  And there's a woman now who runs SpaceX, really Gwynn Shotwell, who was critical. And I also interviewed a, you know, a guy who was there at the foundation. Well, I interviewed two, two people who were at the foundation of both companies, both interesting in many ways, but you know, the, on the SpaceX side, he attracted a lot of, you know, extraordinary engineers. So, and he got it done. You know, Tesla became a going concern and really helped to push other car companies around the planet to succeed. Now, I think a lot of companies have since eclipsed Tesla because Elon took his eye off the ball and for a lot of other reasons. But to say that, that he really launched it, he wasn't the first.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  In fact, in many important ways, he was almost always the second to do something. But he, he managed a, a way forward that really was propulsive in a way that was massively successful. You can't take that away from him. That's a, a fact.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  So what has he actually lied about? I don't know if you want to organize this, your, your thoughts on this. You might track through the specific companies. I don't know how, I don't know how you want to enter it.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  I think the best way is, is to look at Tesla because that's kind of where we started. And I think also the best way to understand this is it's kind of, there's the self mythologizing. We could start there and then we can start with Tesla, the company, and how he was able to get money for it. Because in order to get money for it, he had to go to the stock market. And in order to get to the stock market, he had to exaggerate certain aspects of the company in ways that were deeply fraudulent. But let's start with the founding of Tesla. Because Elon Musk is not the founder of Tesla. The founder of Tesla was a guy named Martin Eberhard and his partner Mark Tarpening. But they were the ones who came up with the essential technology,

• 15:40Speaker 02

  the lithium, lithium ion battery pack that gave the cars so much torque. I mean, that's why they were faster or, or had greater acceleration in the Lamborghini.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  And also they had the business model laid out in their original plan for Tesla, which was start at the high end of the market, you know, get people excited about the car. Because before that time, you know, electric cars were mostly like sewing machines on wheels, right? But, but get people excited about the car and then, and it's expensive initially, but then as more people start to like it, you can drive costs down as you, you know, increase your market share. So all of that was done by Martin and, and Mark initially. Elon comes in as an investor and he's spending most of his time at Tesla, I mean, at SpaceX. But it's somewhere along the line as Tesla began to succeed, Elon bristled over this idea that he wasn't getting as much credit for the company

• 16:36Speaker 02

  as Mark and Martin. And ultimately he pushed Martin out of the company. And in a lawsuit where Martin tried to claw back what he felt he was owed, Elon would only agree to settle the lawsuit when Martin agreed to say that Elon was what he wasn't, which was a founder of Tesla. Now, that's kind of an odd moment. Of course, we can all agree that CEOs are, are credit hogs. But I think to insist in a document that there is a kind of foundational lie at the heart of who you are is an interesting moment because it starts the mythologizing, that Elon Musk is not an investor, he's an inventor. And that would become the essence of the pitch that he would use with people

• 17:20Speaker 02

  in order to shower him with, you know, really high stock valuations based on what he was going to deliver in the future, but way out of proportion to the kind of pitiful economic fundamentals that the company, for much of its time, you know, evidenced. So there's that. And then, starting with Tesla, there's an interesting moment of which I discovered by talking to a few people and they pointed me to a video, which was a kind of a demonstration, a sort of Steve Jobs like demonstration where he's demonstrating something called the battery swap. And, you know, we can all agree that the first question that anybody asks you if you drive an electric car, and I do drive one, it's not a Tesla, it's a Polestar. But, you know, the first question people ask me is what's the range?

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Because it's like, even though most people only drive 15 to 20 miles a day, nevertheless, that's the obsession that people have. So, okay, if you could solve the range problem of a car, of an electric car, that would be great. So Elon comes up with this technique for a battery swap where, and he has a big demonstration with a BMW on one side pulling up to a gas tank and then a Tesla coming into some sort of vague opening in the floor. And the idea is that you can swap out a Tesla battery faster than you can fill up a BMW with gas.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Well, that would be, that would fix everything, right? And he demonstrates this and you think, whoa, he's just solved the essential problem of the electric car. Then he says he's going to launch these things all over California and he does have a battery swap station. But it turns out that no swaps ever occur. And also, the whole swap idea ends up being preposterous because, you know, a Tesla battery weighs over a thousand pounds. And when it comes out of the factory, it's covered with sealant. Everybody's scratching their heads, it's like, what's this all about? Well, it turned out he was reward hacking a peculiar program in California that said, in a, in effect, if you can demonstrate just once, you know,

• 19:22Speaker 02

  an extraordinary efficiency of electric cars will give you a massive subsidy.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  So he was doing it for the subsidy and it was a con because it, it didn't really intend to do it. He just intended to satisfy the conditions of the subsidy and then move on.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so much of the story of Tesla and SpaceX's success is a story of government loans and subsidies and

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  which makes his depredations, running Doge, all the more hypocritical and, and galling, which we'll, we'll get to. But, I mean, there, there still is this bit about there being a blurry boundary between faking it until you make it or just, just, you know, just being optimistic about your, your own prospects and actual fraudulence, right?

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Actually being a con artist. I mean, so like, and, and you spend some considerable time on this piece in, in the film, the, the claims about self-driving.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Which, again, I was, I was, I really had a front row seat for a lot of this. I mean, I, I saw what he was claiming, I owned a Model S, I saw what it could do. And, you know, I think he's admitted that he's been overly optimistic in, in the timeframe he's always put out there, you know, perhaps only retrospectively aware of that. And you can, there's a lot of footage of him, you know, confidently saying, at the end of this year, we'll have full autonomy and it's, it's 2017 or whatever.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  But, well, let's just stipulate that at some point Tesla will get to perfect, whatever this level five, you know, autonomy in its cars. It just won't, wasn't in 2017. What are you inclined to say about that being a fraud? Or just a, kind of the, the carnival barker's path to opening a genuinely thrilling carnival?

• 21:17Speaker 00

  Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharris.org. Subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  I think what Elon Musk did at USAID in that kind of performative cruelty, because, you know, he was warned about the effects of this and went ahead and did it anyway. And honestly, you can have a debate about whether or not we want foreign aid, but it was the instant cutting of it where they were literally stopping food that had already been paid for going to starving children.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Literally burning, burning that food up.