Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney's new documentary "Musk" is arriving at the Venice Film Festival with a warning that stretches far beyond the public image of the tech billionaire.
According to IndieWire, the four-hour documentary contends that information accessed during Tesla chairman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's time leading the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, could be used by AI to sway the U.S. midterm election in November.
Here's what to know
Set for an October theatrical release, "Musk" presents Tesla chairman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as a figure driving instability across politics, media, and government.
One major thread of the film examines DOGE, an initiative of President Donald Trump's administration that ended in 2026. Although it was pitched as an effort to reduce government through staff cuts and technological upgrades, Gibney argues it instead worsened instability while allowing Musk's Gen Z staff to access and archive a large store of government data on American citizens.
At a Venice press conference, Gibney said, "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."
The film also alleges that after Musk's $43 billion purchase of Twitter in 2022, he used X's AI systems to shape what users saw according to his own political and personal preferences.
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Wired journalist Zoë Schiffer and influencer Ashley St. Clair both appear in the documentary. At the press conference, St. Clair said she turned down a $40 million NDA package from Musk and broke with both him and the MAGA movement.
More background
Gibney said the documentary pairs Musk's actual voice with a computer-generated avatar that appears in a talking-head interview in the film, describing the choice as "intentionally ironic."
Gibney explained, "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 added, "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."
Where can I learn more?
Gibney's warning about DOGE data and election influence lands in the middle of a much bigger fight over AI. These stories look at how that debate is playing out in Washington, in public concerns about security, and in the massive buildout powering Big Tech's ambitions.
• In Congress, AI rules are being rejected even as lawmakers face mounting oversight concerns.
• Across the U.S., security concerns around AI are fueling louder public backlash.
• At Big Tech firms, the $725 billion AI boom is straining grids as computing expands.
Read alongside Gibney's claims, they point to the same mix of weak guardrails, public mistrust, and fast-growing AI capacity. That helps explain why questions about data access and political influence are resonating so strongly.
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