Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes share a ‘superpower,’ says documentary director Alex Gibney

• Director Alex Gibney has made documentaries about both Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes.
• He told Business Insider that Musk shares key similarities with the disgraced Theranos founder.
• He said both were able to “convince people of things that they knew not to be true.”

If anyone could find a connection between Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes, it’s director Alex Gibney.

The Oscar-winning filmmaker has made movies on both polarizing figures. In 2019, he made the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.” His latest doc is “Musk,” a close-to-four-hour examination of the richest man in the world.

In a recent interview with Business Insider, Gibney explained how Musk’s rise reminded him of Holmes, who came to prominence in the 2010s as the founder of Theranos, a health technology company that boasted it could run hundreds of medical and diagnostic tests using only a few drops of blood. She’s currently in prison for defrauding investors.

“I think there is a similarity with Elizabeth Holmes,” Gibney told Business Insider. “What was rattling around in my head through this was ‘confidence man.’ Musk, like Holmes, was able, through force of confidence, to convince people of things that they knew not to be true. That became a superpower.”

See the full clip below:

Or read the full interview with Gibney.