“Musk” director Alex Gibney on Tuesday named two apparent reasons why the trillionaire subject of his new documentary, Elon Musk, has begun spending a fortune on the upcoming midterm elections to keep President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans in power.

The acclaimed filmmaker made his case during an appearance on “CNN This Morning.”

“Money,” he told host Audie Cornish. “I mean, it’s kind of two-fold: money and an ability to escape any kind of criminal or civil reckoning for some of the stuff that his companies have done. I think that’s the reason, the primary reason, he supported Trump in the first place.”

The Oscar-winning documentarian explained Tuesday, “His companies were facing a number of civil investigations, and he and Tesla were facing a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice related to fraud surrounding claims about full self-driving at Tesla.”

Gibney claimed that “all of those investigations are gone” following Trump’s 2024 reelection and argued Musk “eliminated them” during his controversial tenure as a “special government employee” and head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Musk, whose companies Tesla and SpaceX have reportedly received billions in federal contracts, saw various government officials — who were reportedly leading investigations or lawsuits against his businesses — fired during Trump’s second term.

Musk had poured more than $250 million into the campaign and later stated, “Without me, Trump would have lost the election.” He has since quietly become the biggest known donor in the midterms and has spent some $276 million since July in aid of the GOP.

“Now I think he’s terrified that if the Democrats were to take control of one or both houses of Congress, that investigations might resume,” said Gibney. “And I think this is the source of his attempts to try to put so much money into these elections, kind of unprecedented amounts.”

Gibney walked back some of his optimism when Cornish asked whether Musk had secured “a massive amount of power” over the U.S. government through his billion-dollar Pentagon contracts and his unilateral control of his network of Starlink satellites.

“He has,” Gibney claimed. “I think that not only is it the connection with the president of the United States, but I think you could say that Starlink, in a way, it has a connected purpose, but it also has a purpose of surveillance. And it’s also a collection purpose.”

He added, “It’s collecting data for his AI systems. His AI systems have fully infiltrated the Pentagon, per [Secretary of Defense] Pete Hegseth, and yet his frontier AI system is the worst. So it’s clearly a kind of a payoff. And SpaceX has kind of taken over the role of NASA.”

Musk has threatened to sue Gibney over parts of the film that suggest he had interfered with the results of the 2024 election via Starlink. Gibney said during a screening of the film Friday that Musk might have, but he was careful to note that he can’t prove as much.

The documentarian went on to claim that Musk believes humanity is living in a simulation, and that this perspective has the world’s richest man “playing a kind of existential video game” and trying “to shape our reality” without any apparent regard for people’s wellbeing.

“So, I mean, his power is immense,” Gibney told Cornish. “And we haven’t even spoken about the sort of propagandistic power he wields through the control of his platform, X, formerly Twitter. So, yes, he has a fantastic amount of power.”

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