Elon Musk’s legal team is going after filmmaker Alex Gibney over his upcoming documentary“Musk,”and the dispute centers on an exchange about“lasers”from space. Attorney Alex Spiro sent a defamation threat letter to Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, arguing the film insinuates a debunked conspiracy theory that SpaceX Starlink satellites helped rig the 2024 election for Trump. The documentary includes Ashley St. Clair, Musk’s ex-girlfriend, describing texts Musk sent her before the election about using lasers from space. NPR independently authenticated those October 6, 2024 messages.
St. Clair’s response to the legal threat was blunt: she called it“a joke.”Gibney’s camp echoed the sentiment, with one quote noting they’re“more likely to colonize Mars than win a defamation case against Alex Gibney.”The film also features an AI deepfake of Musk, created after he declined to be interviewed. Musk has publicly attacked the project as a“hit piece”ahead of its release next month.
The story raises bigger questions about defamation standards for public figures, the ethics of AI recreations in documentary film, and why the Starlink vote-rigging conspiracy keeps circulating despite repeated debunking. With the film’s release approaching, expect this conversation to get louder. Will you be watching when it drops?
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Local Lawton
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