Elon Musk is reportedly “freaking out” over a new documentary by documentarian and investigative journalist Alex Gibney.

And by all accounts, there might be a good reason for why Musk is lashing out at Gibney, calling his work a “hit piece” and “boring af.”

The four-hour documentary, which had its world premiere today at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week, featured interviews with Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk, who has had five of his (known) 14 children.

As Agence France Presse reports after attending the premiere, an emotional Justine Musk recalled the billionaire mistakenly claim that he was holding their first child Nevada when he died due to sudden infant death syndrome, when it was actually her.

“I learned the term gaslighting through my relationship with Elon,” she said in the documentary.

She also claimed that Musk refers to the mothers of his many children as “breeders” who “are interchangeable,” a vile descriptor perfectly highlighting the entrepreneur’s deep-rooted misogyny and bizarre obsession with procreation.

Musk has often argued that falling birth rates are humanity’s biggest threat and a major obstacle in his quest to become a multiplanetary species. He has reportedly even gone as far as to offer his sperm to SpaceX employees to seed a Mars colony.

The term “breeder” also highlights his troubled relationship with the at least four known women he has had children with. During the documentary’s premiere this week, Musk’s ex and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, who is featured in the movie, told reporters that she was “offered the opportunity not to speak for $40 million.”

In the documentary, Justine Musk also recalled Musk whispering into her ear that he’s the “alpha in this relationship” — during their first dance at their wedding in January 2000, per AFP.

Her remarks aren’t exactly hard to believe, as we’ve seen plenty of behavior that perfectly aligns with her harrowing comments. Case in point, Musk share a shockingly sexist tweet last year claiming that women were designed to be captured or bartered as property. He has also made revolting tweets in an apparent effort to hit on the singer Taylor Swift.

Musk has also treated his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, with utter disdain and unbelievable cruelty, going on intentionally hurtful anti-trans tirades and pronouncing her “dead.”

More about the documentary: Elon Musk Seems Legitimately Shaken Over This New Documentary

The post Elon Musk Has Been Calling Women “Breeders” Since His First Marriage, His First Wife Says appeared first on Futurism.

Tesla’s flashy unveiling of its Cybercab robotaxi in 2024 left some glaring questions unanswered.

The sleek, gold-colored coupé impressed with a futuristic design, but baffled onlookers with its cramped two-seat interior, lack of a charging port, and a dubious, far-too-good-to-be-true $30,000 price tag.

Just under two years later, the first Cybercabs are starting to hit the streets in Austin, Texas — and Tesla is just itching to sell you one. Last week, the EV maker started handing out a “Robotaxi interest form,” as Electrek reported at the time, in an apparent effort attract would-be entrepreneurs willing to buy an entire fleet of the unusual vehicles.

Put simply, the idea is to share revenue from ride income with Tesla while the vehicles operate on the carmaker’s network, using its self-driving tech.

It’s part of a much broader plan. For many years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised that its Full Self-Driving-enabled vehicles, including the Cybercab, could effectively turn into an appreciating money-printing machine, allowing owners to sit on their couch and magically watch the money roll in.

As early as 2018, Musk promised investors that he saw the “future as kind of a shared electric autonomy, so that you’d be able to do ride-hailing or share the car any way,” likening it to “some combination of like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb.”

But there are plenty of reasons businesspeople should hesitate before takeing Tesla up on the offer of operating a Robotaxi fleet, as Electrek‘s Fred Lambert argued in a compelling essay this week.

Basically, he pointed out, “if running a fleet of Cybercabs were actually profitable, Tesla wouldn’t sell you a single one.” It’s like claiming you’ve found an infinite money glitch — and then instead of quietly profiting off it, selling a get-rich-quick book on how to do it yourself.

There are also looming technical questions. Musk’s lofty promises of a vehicle that completes ride-hailing requests autonomously while also appreciating in value has little, if any, bearing with reality in 2026. To the contrary, the EV maker’s offerings are among some of the fastest depreciating vehicles on the market today.

Then there’s the questionable value proposition. Tesla controls the entire network, the self-driving software, and prices. It even “sets the split,” as Lambert argues. Instead, fleet owners are stuck eating the “capital cost and the depreciation, while Tesla keeps the software margin and its cut of every fare.”

In other words, “you don’t own a business in that arrangement. You own the downside.”

It’s a dubious business opportunity closely reminiscent of Tesla’s infamous FSD advanced driver assistance software. Owners once shelled out a massive $15,000 — before it became exclusively a $99 a month subscription — to access a feature that’s still a complete disaster, leading to fatal collisions and terrifying close calls even after many years of development.

Not only are they spending the equivalent of a small car on faulty software, they’re willing to shoulder the risk as well. Tesla has a long track record of trying to wriggle out of lawsuits arising from these accidents, arguing it was the driver’s fault for engaging the software and not paying attention.

Much like its regular lineup of FSD-enabled vehicles, Tesla’s Cybercab relies entirely on a camera-based autonomous driving system, an approach that experts say is fundamentally flawed.

Nonetheless, as the Austin American-Statesman reports, local investors in Austin are chomping at the opportunity to run their own Cybercab fleet.

Meanwhile, regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are watching closely. The agency opened a probe into the Tesla, questioning that its new Cybercab “meets all applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.”

More on the Cybercab: Tesla’s Glitchy Cybercab Accidentally Lets Passengers Access Controls to Manually Drive the Car Using Virtual Joystick on In-Vehicle Screen

The post There’s a Huge Economic Problem With Tesla’s Cybercabs appeared first on Futurism.

The company said it plans to dig more than 150 kilometers of tunnels in the Middle Eastern country.

The Boring Company has closed a $3 billion Series D funding round led by the United Arab Emirates, valuing Elon Musk’s tunneling venture at $23 billion.

That’s roughly four times its 2022 valuation of about $5.7 billion. And most of the case for it sits in tunnels the company hasn’t dug yet.

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Tech mogul calls director Alex Gibney a ‘bitter old man’ who has ‘zero integrity’ in series of posts on X

Elon Musk has issued an angry tirade at the film-maker behind a four-hour documentary about his life and influence, labelling the director, Alex Gibney, a “bitter old man” who has “zero integrity”.

Gibney, who has previously made films about the collapse of Enron, WikiLeaks and Vladimir Putin, premiered his Musk documentary at the Venice film festival this week. He said he believed the world’s richest man was “extremely dangerous”.

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© Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

© Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

© Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon said AI will become ‘superhuman systems’ that can cause human extinction by the end of the decade

Just a day after three Anthropic researchers warned that artificial intelligence could kill off humanity within the decade, lawmakers have begun lashing out about the risks of the burgeoning technology.

Ted Cruz, a republican senator from Texas, said in an interview on ABC’s The View, that AI posed a “catastrophic risk” and that he “read that whole tweet thread that that developer put out. It was highly concerning.

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© Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

© Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

© Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Alex Gibney’s marathon documentary delivers numerous eye-raising insights into the broligarch’s business deals, early idealism and apocalyptic appetite for fathering children

Veteran documentarian Alex Gibney’s film about the richest broligarch on the planet has been one of the most eagerly anticipated films at the Venice film festival this year. The Oscar-winning 72-year-old, who has in previous films taken on the US military, the Catholic church, Vladimir Putin and Scientology, has been investigating the tech tycoon’s ascent and speaking to people in his orbit since late 2022, before his Maga turn and Trump 2.0.

The result clocks in at just under four hours and presents a comprehensive answer to how on earth one man managed to amass so much money and political influence. It is shocking less for any individual new pieces of information Gibney has unearthed than for its totality. Here are six things the film tells us:

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© Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP

© Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP

© Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP