Filmmaker Alex Gibney has spent years examining figures who command extraordinary public attention, and he has now drawn a direct line between two of them: Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes. In a recent conversation with Business Insider, the Oscar-winning director said the Tesla and SpaceX chief reminded him of the disgraced Theranos founder — not because of their industries, but because of how each man and woman managed to sway an audience.
Gibney is unusually positioned to make the comparison. His 2019 film “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” chronicled Holmes and the blood-testing startup that promised to run hundreds of medical and diagnostic tests from a few drops of blood. His newest project, “Musk,” runs close to four hours and profiles the world’s richest person. Holmes is currently serving a prison sentence for defrauding investors.
A shared ability to sell a version of reality
What struck Gibney during the making of the Musk film, he said, was a recurring phrase in his own mind: “confidence man.” He described a pattern in which both Musk and Holmes used sheer force of confidence to persuade people of claims those listeners already understood to be untrue. That capacity, Gibney argued, functioned almost like a superpower.
The observation is not a legal judgment or an accusation of equivalence. It is a filmmaker’s note on persuasion — the way conviction itself can become a tool, independent of whether the underlying facts hold up. Gibney framed it as something that rattled around in his head throughout the project, a connective thread between two very different stories.
Why the comparison lands
The two documentaries sit at opposite ends of a spectrum. Holmes rose in the 2010s as the founder of a health technology company that made sweeping claims about its diagnostic capabilities; her story ended in a fraud conviction. Musk, by contrast, is the subject of a nearly four-hour portrait at the height of his wealth and influence. Yet Gibney’s point is that the mechanics of belief — how a founder gets investors, employees, or the public to accept a vision — can look strikingly similar even when the outcomes diverge.
In his telling, the common ingredient is not the technology or the market but the performance of certainty. Holmes and Musk, he suggested, both understood that confidence can travel further than evidence, and both used that understanding to bring others along.
What the director wants viewers to take away
Gibney’s comparison is less about equating the two figures than about asking audiences to notice how persuasion works. The Holmes saga became a cautionary tale about startup hype and the cost of unchecked claims. The Musk film, arriving now, invites a similar scrutiny of how one of the most powerful people in the world commands belief.
For viewers, the through line is a question rather than a verdict: when someone speaks with total assurance, what should we trust — the confidence, or what we already know to be true? Gibney’s answer, drawn from two very different documentaries, is that the gap between those two things is exactly where the story lives.
