Documentary to Examine If Elon Musk Used 'Space Lasers' to Rig the 2024 Election

As our own Gordon K reported the other day, Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney is currently editing a four-hour documentary on Elon Musk. The Hollywood Reporter told us that "At stake with 'Musk', its creator wants to tell us, is nothing less than the future of democracy." We also learned that “Someone who worked closely with Elon told me, ‘He’s the most miserable man I’ve ever met.’ So he’s inflicting his misery on everyone else.”

Michael Shellenberger reports that the HBO movie will examine the conspiracy theory that Musk used "space lasers" to rig the 2024 election for Donald Trump.

Elon Musk used "space lasers" to steal the election for Trump, @alexgibneyfilm alleges in his new HBO movie. But that conspiracy theory was debunked in 2024. And there is no evidence to support Gibney's claim that Musk stole federal data to corrupt future elections. pic.twitter.com/DytXlTR6lr
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) September 4, 2026

Shellenberger says former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair was a major source for the documentary.

Elon Musk may have used his Starlink satellites to steal the 2024 election for Donald Trump, according to a new Alex Gibney documentary seen by The Hollywood Reporter (THR).

“Two revelations, or at least intimations, especially stand out,” writes Steven Zeitchik. The first is… pic.twitter.com/3qNvMLOCR9
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) September 4, 2026

The post continues:

… an allegation by “Musk ex and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, a central figure in the documentary,” who says Musk had a “degree of certainty” about the elections that “I had never seen before.”
She says Musk told her, “I have ten thousand lasers in space.”
“So you think he was referring to Starlink?” asks Gibney, who has made a series of films about frauds including “Enron,” “Scientology,” and “The Inventor,” about Elizabeth Holmes’s start-up Theranos.
“I mean, I don’t know where else he has space lasers,” replies St. Clair.
According to Zeitchik, Gibney “hints he is taking it seriously when he then says in his patented voiceover, ‘What is Elon building, what are his goals, what are his actual motivations, and do we even know this man at all?’”
But election officials in North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania confirmed what most journalists and people in politics already knew, which is that voting equipment is not connected to the internet. “Our election equipment is 100% air-gapped,” said Georgia elections spokesman Mike Hassinger, who called the claims “absolutely conspiratorial nonsense.”
And fact-checkers hostile to Musk debunked the Starlink theory in November 2024. http://FactCheck.org quoted a Georgia official saying “No Georgia election tabulation is connected to the internet, ever, not by Starlink or anything else.” PolitiFact rated the theory “Pants on Fire.” Poynter traced the theory to Threads posts from despairing Democrats “amid a larger wave of election denial claims from liberals that mimic Republicans’ false claims about 2020 election fraud.”
And yet at no point in the over 5,000-word THR article does Zeitchik ever mention the fact-checks. Zeitchik did not respond to Public’s request for comment, though THR did, as we describe below...