Alex Gibney Warns Elon Musk’s DOGE Data Could Be Used ‘for an AI to Influence the Election’

Alex Gibney‘s years-in-the-works, epically scary documentary “Musk” premieres at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday to much buzz. The four-hour film, coming to theaters this October, draws a portrait of Tesla chairman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as a reckless destroyer of democracy and dismantler of free speech. But it also spends a lot of time unpacking the South African tech bro’s relationship with President Donald Trump, and his stint as the head of the administration’s ad hoc Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Shuttered in 2026, the initiative was meant to streamline government operations through staff reductions and technological upgrades, but as Gibney’s film posits, it only increased instability (and probably the federal deficit) in the process. Tasked with heading up DOGE before his public breakup with Trump, Musk hired a Gen Z staff who, as the film shows, accessed and archived a trove of U.S. citizen data while scaling back or jettisoning government agencies and programs. Gibney was joined by Wired reporter Zoë Schiffer and social media influencer Ashley St. Clair at a Venice Film Festival press conference ahead of Tuesday’s premiere. They both give testimony in the documentary, with St. Clair detailing how she cut ties with Musk (and the MAGA movement). At the press conference, she said he tried to buy her silence with a $40-million NDA package she rejected. The press corps asked Gibney about the film’s wide-ranging implications for global democracy and how Musk, even while no longer a government agent, could influence the upcoming U.S. midterm election in November. The documentary “Musk” details how, after Elon Musk’s $43 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022, he manipulated X’s artificial intelligence algorithms to skew the display of content in favor of his personal and political views. That could happen with the platform again as we head into the election, Gibney argued. “We went as far as we could in the film. We know that during DOGE, the DOGE boys, had sort of super-admin status at all of the agencies, and that meant that they had access to an extraordinary amount of data on all American citizens,” Musk said. “Moving that data would have been as simple, as I understand it, as moving a file into a folder. And could that folder be at SpaceX? And might he be using that for an AI to influence the election? Yeah, I think it’s a good conjecture, and that would be sort of Cambridge Analytica on steroids. But there are also AI products that may use that data in ways we haven’t even imagined. So, I put it in the film not because I know it’s going to happen, but because I think it might happen, and it was kind of a warning.” As for the AI used in the documentary to construct a digital avatar of Musk who provides a wide-spanning “interview,” Gibney said the usage was “intentionally ironic. My views on AI are complicated… It’s a powerful technology. The problems with AI have more to do with the human beings who are manipulating the technology, and manipulating it in ways that seem to be serving them, you know, and using it in a rather reckless way, that is intending to make the rest of us irrelevant. So I think that’s the real danger in AI, is falling into the control of a very few powerful, reckless, and unaccountable hands.” Gibney also said that Musk’s lawyers signed off on the avatar, which is built from an archive of Musk’s public comments in interviews and other online footage.