This article was updated at 11:50 am ET on September 4 after we received a second email from The Hollywood Reporter after our publishing deadline had passed.
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 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. 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.
