Making Sense with Sam Harris - #497 — The Confidence Man

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

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.

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and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today. I am here with Alex Gibney. Alex, great to see you again. Good to see you, Sam. I've turned the tables on you. Last time you were talking to me, Now I'm talking to you.

Yeah, it's your turn. 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 release this will be out in theaters everywhere, and then eventually on HBO. I've 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 documentaries 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 diluted people

creating a fair amount of harm. And that is a theme in your current effort. It sounds like a segue. Yeah. It sounds like a segue. 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, that 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.

It's a good question. I mean, ultimately, I think we decided that for all sorts of reasons that we would explore a theatrical release, a kind of immersion. in the 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 hell, keep going. Yeah. So I kept going. Well, yeah, so that's a very interesting starting point. 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.

That's right. of Elon, which predates virtually all of the controversy of him lurching into right-wing politics 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 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? Are there really two different Alex Gibneys associated with this project?

Well, there is a place where I started and there's a place where I ended up. I wouldn't say there are 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 testament. 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 petto guy episode with the diver who's trying to rescue the Thai cave kids 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 creating a lot of power even then. He was at the time the richest man in the world. So I dug in, 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. So,

Yeah, I found the experience watching it a little disorienting because so you cover, you know, all of the years of his public life, really, 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, you interviewed me for the film and so I'm in there to some extent. And I think when you interviewed me at the time, I was more on the side of thinking that Twitter, and his engagement with his own algorithm and growing fame and wealth and power had deranged him more than revealed him, 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 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 not seeing him as a bully and a narcissist and a fame and power-seeking, you know,

monster of any kind, really. And yet some of that evidence was available had I been watching the footage that was in your film. And I want to go into, I mean, I certainly want to go in, I want to be as fair as we can be to Elon here, and I want to explore, you know, whether you're as fair as you should be in your film. Sure. 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 an unusual experience for you? Well, it's been both unusual and to some extent par for the course. I mean, there were 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 two docs with Elon. And so we had an actual entree to him. And Jesse wrote him a number 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. And this was just at the first mention that you were making the film in the first place, the first time. 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 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. Were there people who had a lot to say but weren't willing to go on camera to say those things? 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 again. other people. The one exception to that rule appears in the film, Reed Hoffman. Yeah. But that was kind of like,

I'll talk to you off the record or on background. And some of the album, 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. 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 still counts themselves among his friend group would be inclined to have sat down with you because they would feel they were betraying a friend

there, even just to sing his praises in that context. Yeah, and I found that odd. I mean, there was one person I'm thinking of in particular I went to who I know rather well, and it was friends with Elon. And he said, come on, sit down with me just off the record. You know, because, and tell

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 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. Well, you essentially make the case in the film that Elon is a con man of sorts. I mean, it's, 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 support her. But it did seem that in the end she had this black box. that was not doing much of anything. No. And it really wasn't. It was called the Edison, who, by the way, was in his own way, a kind of huckster, you know, though he did really invent stuff, but he did exaggerate his accomplishments a lot.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, but so Elizabeth Holmes was, was engaged in the end in a kind of, you know, elaborate fraud. I mean, Elon has transformed multiple industries. And he's, I mean, you make, you make it clear that he has. 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. 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, with the Model S, he built a four-door sedan that, that outperformed Lamborghinis and Ferraris on the racetrack, right? So, I mean, that was, that was something real. And so it is with SpaceX. I mean, he's put, you know, more satellites into orbit than the rest of humanity combined, right? So there's, 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 as a former friend. But how do you resolve that tension as a storyteller? Well, you're right that he's not Elizabeth Holmes.

Elizabeth Holmes didn't have a product. You know, that box, as we discussed, it was a joke. And you're right, he was a, well, and is a great industrialist in some ways. I mean, you know, let's acknowledge some of his superpowers. You know, he had an 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.

And there's a woman now who runs SpaceX, really Gwynne Shotwell, who was critical. And I also interviewed a guy who was there at the foundation. Well, I interviewed two people who were at the foundation of both companies, both interesting in many ways. But on the SpaceX side, he attracted a lot of, you know, a lot of, you know, extraordinary engineers. 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 he really launched it, he wasn't the first. In fact, in many important ways, he was almost always the second to do something. But he, he, he, he, he, he, managed 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 fact. So what has he actually lied about? I don't know if you want to organize this, your thoughts on this, you might track through the specific companies.

I don't know how you want to enter it. I think the best way 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, the lithium ion battery pack that gave the cars so much torque. I mean, that's why they were faster or had greater acceleration in the Lamborghini. 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? Yeah. 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 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 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 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 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 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 pole star. But, you know, the first question people ask me is, what's the range? 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. 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 1,000 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 effect, if you can demonstrate just once, you know, an extraordinary efficiency of electric cars will give you a massive subsidy. Yeah. So he was doing it for the subsidy, and it was a con because it didn't really intend to do it. He just intend to satisfy the conditions of the subsidy and then move on. Yeah, well, so much of the story of Tesla and SpaceX's success is a story of government loans and subsidies, which makes his depredations running Doge all the more.

hypocritical and galling, which we'll get to. But, I mean, there still is this bit about there being a blurry boundary between faking it until you make it or just, you know, just being optimistic about your own prospects and actual fraudulence, right? Correct. Actually being a con artist. I mean, so, like, and you spend some considerable time on this piece in the film, the the claims about self-driving.

Yes. Which, again, I was, I was, I really had a front row seat for a lot of this. I mean, 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 time frame 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,

will have full autonomy and it's 2017 or whatever. But let's just stipulate that at some point Tesla will get to perfect, whatever there's level five, you know, autonomy in its cars. It just wasn't in 2017. What are you inclined to say about that being a fraud or just a kind of the Carnival Barker's path

to opening a genuinely thrilling carnival? Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at sam harris.org. Subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player. I think what Elon Musk did at USAID in that kind of performative cruelty, because 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. Literally burning that food up.