The Noble Cause Corruption of Elon Musk

In an interview with the LA Times, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney — whose upcoming Elon Musk documentary is set for release in October — offered a diagnosis of the man he has spent years studying. The core of Gibney's argument is not about technology or business strategy. It is about a pattern of deception he has documented repeatedly across his career: what he calls "noble cause corruption."

"Once you convince yourself that you have a noble cause, once you decide that you're a force for good, you're entitled to bend the rules," Gibney said. "Not just a little bit. Now you bend the rules a little bit more, and maybe a little bit more."

The crime, Gibney argues, "really was not a tech crime. It was an Elizabeth Holmes like crime."

The Fiction That Benefits Him

Gibney's research began with a book called Ludicrous by Ed Niedermeyer, which argued that the gap between what Tesla promised and what it delivered was itself ludicrous. Musk had "confected all of these stunts to fake people out and make people think that the company was something that it wasn't in order to get to where it needed to go."