Elon Musk threatens to sue over Gibney documentary's "space lasers" claim

President Donald Trump, right, speaks during a news conference with Elon Musk in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, May 30, 2025, in Washington. Evan Vucci/AP hide caption

Elon Musk has in recent days been targeting his ire at filmmaker Alex Gibney, whose forthcoming documentary, Musk , offers a scathing look at the tech mogul's rise. Now, a lawyer for Musk is threatening to file a defamation lawsuit ahead of the film's release next month.

In a letter sent to Gibney's Jigsaw Productions, the company behind the film, Musk attorney Alex Spiro homes in on an exchange between Gibney and Ashley St. Clair, a former MAGA influencer who dated Musk and had a child with the billionaire.

St. Clair described text messages Musk sent her before the November 2024 presidential election in which he said he was "feeling more optimistic" about Donald Trump winning because "tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix." When St. Clair asked for clarity, Musk said he planned on tapping "'Lasers' from space," adding that "I have over 10 thousand lasers in space right now."

In the film, Gibney asked St. Clair if she believed Musk's texts referred to satellites owned by his rocket company, SpaceX. She responded, "I don't know where else he has lasers."

NPR has obtained and authenticated the texts between Musk and St. Clair, which were sent on Oct. 6, 2024.

In Spiro's letter, which NPR has also reviewed, he described a debunked conspiracy theory that SpaceX's Starlink satellites somehow uploaded votes for Trump in swing states. Spiro argued that Gibney promoted that refuted claim in his film.

"Starlink was not connected to vote tabulation. Election officials in multiple states, independent cybersecurity researchers, and fact-checkers publicly refuted the Starlink vote-rigging claim in November 2024, and nothing since has revived it," Spiro wrote. "Starlink's satellites communicate by laser inter-satellite link; that is what 'lasers in space' describes," he wrote. "You are therefore on notice, before release, that the insinuation is false, that the material refuting it is public, and that you chose not to be told the rest."