Elon Musk is gearing up for a legal fight over a new documentary he says is nothing more than a politically motivated smear campaign dressed up as journalism.
Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro, fired off a formal legal notice to director Alex Gibney’s production company, Jigsaw Productions, this week, according to reports from The Hollywood Reporter and People. The letter, dated September 3, takes direct aim at the four-hour documentary titled “Musk,” which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is set to hit theaters in October.
At the center of the dispute is the film’s suggestion that Musk may have used his tech companies to help tip the 2024 election in President Trump’s favor. Spiro didn’t mince words in the letter, warning Gibney’s team that the insinuation is false and that they chose to ignore evidence proving as much. “You are 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 controversy stems from comments in the film by Musk’s ex, Ashley St. Clair, who suggests Musk left a Mar-a-Lago event early and later told her he knew the election would go Trump’s way, describing a level of certainty she’d never seen from him before. St. Clair also claims Musk told her he was going to “unleash the anomaly in the matrix” using his “10,000 lasers in space,” a reference to his Starlink satellite network.
Spiro shut that theory down cold, noting that Starlink had nothing to do with vote tabulation and that election officials, independent cybersecurity researchers, and fact-checkers already thoroughly debunked any vote-rigging claims tied to Musk back in November 2024. He also accused the filmmakers of refusing to engage with Musk’s team despite repeated attempts to present the facts through standard journalistic fact-checking.
Musk himself has pushed back hard on other claims in the documentary, including St. Clair’s assertion that she turned down a $40 million non-disclosure agreement. “She was never offered that and has a history of making false claims,” Musk wrote on X. He responded to another claim in the film, that he told St. Clair he wanted a “legion of children before the civil war,” with nothing more than a laughing emoji.
Musk has publicly blasted the documentary as a “hit piece,” saying it features what he called a “hit list of people who either have an axe to grind or don’t even know me but still have an axe to grind.”
With legal threats now on the table, this fight between the world’s richest man and an acclaimed documentary filmmaker is far from over, and it’s shaping up to be one of the more contentious media battles of the year.
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