AMNA NAWAZ: Elon Musk remains one of the more powerful and controversial figures in business, science, tech, and politics.

President Trump paid tribute to Musk earlier today, awarding him one of the nation's highest science awards.

Musk played a central role in the early days of the second Trump administration.

And a new documentary about him opens in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, then nationwide next week.

William Brangham has our look.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Elon Musk is one of the most consequential and controversial figures in the world today.

Several of his companies, Tesla, Starlink, SpaceX, have revolutionized their industries and made Musk the richest man on Earth.

His political influence is also vast.

He owns the social media site X, gave nearly $300 million, the biggest donor by far, to President Trump's reelection.

And as the short-lived head of DOGE, Musk oversaw the gutting of major parts of the U.S.

government, including the dismantling of USAID.

The new documentary "Musk," directed by Alex Gibney, tries to take stock of this gigantic, troubled figure, chronicling everything from his innovations to embrace of far right politics.

Academy Award-winning director and producer Alex Gibney joins us now.

Alex, thank you so much for being here.

ALEX GIBNEY, Director, "Musk": Great to be here.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You say at the beginning of this film that you wanted to answer this essential question, which is, how did Musk amass all this power and how did we collectively give it to him?

And before we get to that answer, I wonder if you would just remind us a little bit of the scope of his reach and his influence.

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, I mean, he has this massive international car company, Tesla, which is now making robots.

He owns SpaceX, which means he basically has cornered the market on rockets going into orbit and beyond.

Out of that grew Starlink, a kind of alternative satellite Internet service that is -- now means he has these tentacles spreading all over the world in a kind of cyber way.

And then he has X, a kind of propaganda platform which he can loan to powerful despots when he wants favors from them.

So it's a pretty integrated empire, which also he shuttles assets and resources back and forth.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Right.

ALEX GIBNEY: So he has enormous financial power, mostly based on the price of stock, which he wields in political ways.

And he bought the president of the United States, and I think he did so because he knew he would be a transactional figure.

And now he has this kind of symbiotic relationship with him that gives him enormous political power, as well as access to all sorts of money that is taxpayer dollars.

So that's a lot of power.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: A lot of power.

This exact point is made by Ashley St.

Clair, who was a former girlfriend of Musk's and one of the many women who have had multiple children with him.

Let's play a little bit of what she said.

ASHLEY ST.

CLAIR, Former Girlfriend of Elon Musk: If you were to ask someone on the right what they think of Elon, he's a free speech God.

And someone on the left, he's just someone who sends hateful tweets and he's lost his mind.

Both are very comforting, but both are completely insufficient to the immense amount of power and influence he has.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I mean, you give Musk in the film a fair amount of credit for his business acumen, but you also stressed his canny ability to scoop up government contracts.

How much -- when you look at the scope of his career, how much of it is reliant on federal government contracts?

ALEX GIBNEY: Billions of dollars.

I mean, I'm not going to remember the exact figure right now, but it's inconceivable that Tesla would have succeeded without federal subsidies, mostly carbon credits.

And also SpaceX on its face is basically a socialist enterprise.

It just goes to the government for money to do launches.

Now, Starlink is more of a private portion of SpaceX.

So it's inconceivable to think that Musk would have obtained the power and influence and success that he had without the generosity of the federal government, our taxpayer dollars.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: People who have watched Musk's over his entire career are somewhat confused by his rightward turn.

A lot of people first got to know him as this innovative guy who was running an electric car company.

He seemed to be concerned about climate change.

And now we have this person who has embraced some of the darkest hard right policy prescriptions.

Do you have a sense as to how he made that journey?

ALEX GIBNEY: I think it was pragmatism.

I mean, I think the one thing that he can't abide is constraints on his power.

And the more power he got, the more offended he was by constraints.

I think really what it was about was he was in a lot of trouble with federal agencies, civil and also criminal.

And they were investigating him hard.

And I think he felt that, if he didn't get behind Donald Trump, he might be in prison.

And so it was very pragmatic, I think, on his side.

He didn't want constraints, but also didn't want to go to prison.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The embrace of Trump led him to then being appointed to the head of DOGE, this -- the Department of Governmental Efficiency.

And he cut all manner of programs, as I mentioned, including USAID.

When you look back at the legacy of DOGE and what it did, how do you measure its legacy?

ALEX GIBNEY: I think you measure it two ways.

One is, it wasn't at all about, waste fraud and abuse.

In fact, for all sorts of reasons, it probably -- if you project out about five or 10 years, it's added $500 billion to the deficit.

But I think it really had a different purpose.

And the purpose was to really destroy government as we know it, and particularly the regulatory aspects of government, particularly the regulatory aspects of government that were looking at his businesses.

They would fire people recklessly without having any idea.

But they were very sophisticated about how they accessed the data, the electronic data that is basically the information that the government has on all of us.

And my understanding is, and based on sources, that they had super admin status, which meant they had total access to this digital data.

Now, the question is, and it's the question we pose in the film, if you have access to all of the federal data on American citizens, where did you put it?

Is it at SpaceX?

And if it's at SpaceX, is it training in AI that might be for use in, say, the upcoming midterm elections?

Those are some of the questions we ask.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You have multiple people in this film testifying to this.

You even say as much in your own narration that you view Elon Musk and his rise to power and his influence as a threat to democracy.

Make that case.

ALEX GIBNEY: I think, if you destroy the checks and balances, if you help to destroy the checks and balances that basically steer private enterprise toward public good, you're eliminating the essential feature of a democracy.

He eliminated those checks and balances, and by effectively giving us Trump, who has now eviscerated in many ways the independence of the Department of Justice and the FBI, we're veering toward a society that's power and for power's sake, without any tether to the popular will.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The film is called "Musk."

Alex Gibney, thank you so much for being here.

ALEX GIBNEY: Thank you.

AMNA NAWAZ: And, for the record, during the height of DOGE's operations, President Trump denied that he ceded too much power to Musk tied to his political contributions.

The "News Hour" has also requested an interview with Elon Musk.

We have not yet received a response.