‘Elon Is a Nuke’

In December 2021, Elon Musk sat for an interview with The Babylon Bee , a conservative satire site.

Having covered the typical topics (wokeness, free speech, Elizabeth Warren) and finding themselves with a bit more time to fill, the outlet’s then–creative director closed out the chat with a request.

“ The Babylon Bee is a Christian organization, and we’re a ministry,” he reminded Musk.

So “we’re wondering if you could do us a quick solid and accept Jesus as your lord and savior?” Musk laughed.

The others did too.

The guys waited for an answer, and Musk, after rambling a bit, gave one.

Sure, he replied with a shrug—why not? “If Jesus is saving people,” he said, “I mean, I won’t stand in his way.” The exchange makes a brief but incredibly effective appearance in Musk , the documentarian Alex Gibney’s new film: Asked for a come-to-Jesus moment, Musk professes his faith in himself.

The Musk of 2021 was considerably less consequential than the Musk of today.

He had not yet added Twitter—humanity’s “collective consciousness,” he once called it—to his portfolio, nor had he staged his hostile takeover of the United States government or become the world’s first trillionaire .

Still, Musk had slightly more reason than most to assume his high status on the cosmic org chart.

Through Tesla and Starlink and SpaceX, his dominion stretched over the heavens and the Earth.

Through Neuralink and his assorted experiments with artificial intelligence, Musk was expanding his reach into human hearts and minds.

As a media figure, too, he was all but inescapable: a piece of software downloaded into people’s lives whether they had opted in to him or not.

Power, at that sort of scale, changes every equation.