In Florida in 2019, Dillon Angulo had gotten out of his car to stargaze with his girlfriend Naibel Benavides when a Tesla sedan that was on partial autopilot slammed into them, fatally throwing her into woodland. Tesla deleted the data it transmitted about the accident and denied responsibility. In 2021, in Germany — where Tesla also operates a manufacturing plant — Achim Oldenburg was out in his Tesla when it crashed into a tree on a straight stretch of road and burst into flames, killing him. His widow, Anja, suspects the vehicle’s automated driving system was to blame — though Tesla claimed it had no data to share on the accident. Andreas Pichler weaves these two cases into his streaming-ready documentary Elon Musk Unveiled: The Tesla Experiment, which screens at DOK.fest München, and interviews family members of the victims to underscore the human toll when machines malfunction. What’s more, these fatalities were not freak events, the film argues, but were the direct result of systemic problems at the electric vehicle company, which Elon Musk ran with an obsession for accelerating scientific innovation and a disdain for regulation, wildly talking up the capabilities of the cars even as a multitude of safety-related defects emerged, and allowing car owners to beta-test experimental software on public roads despite the risks.
The Urban Liberal Darling
Tesla’s popularity as a status symbol for forward-thinking and climate-conscious urbanites has long since crested, and nothing too revelatory is in reality unveiled by the documentary, which revisits controversies already largely covered by the media (the German business newspaper Handelsblatt collaborated on the film). A note at the end says that Elon Musk, Trump and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment. But, as well as bereaved families seeking justice, many former employees did speak, contributing to a convincing picture of shady practices at the firm. By going back to how Musk started, the film lays out, in an easily digestible form, his Silicon Valley mindset and how the Tesla venture fits into his broader ambitions to create a future on Mars, with buying the support of the far right possibly a strategic move to that end.
A few deaths along the way would be collateral damage for safer roads of the future, or simply for greater wealth.
It’s suggested that Elon Musk is the ultimate product of Silicon Valley, and the extreme libertarian values that regard government interference as an obstacle to profit. The idea that Tesla was bringing the approach of a software start-up to the motor industry excited investors and fuelled a hyped launch of its shares on the stock market in 2010, and it mushroomed from an obscure company into the hottest name in the business very quickly. Musk was able to leverage his credentials as a leader in climate action and a clean, sustainable future — a reputation that did not last as a desperate need for money to fund development took over, coupled with an aggressive Silicon Valley ethos of pushing over ethical and regulatory boundaries as a shortcut to a perceived long-term utopia in which technology will provide the answers for everything. A few deaths along the way would be collateral damage for safer roads of the future, or simply for greater wealth. Not to mention contributing to SpaceX’s larger mission to colonise outer space, the project that is his real passion.
Roman obsessions
At least, that’s the picture that emerges from interviews with whistleblowers like ex-Tesla engineer Cristina Balan and former service technician Lukasz Krupski, who both felt they could not stay silent about the hiding of safety issues like phantom braking—and were then, they say, swiftly pushed out of their jobs. Missy Cummings, a professor of robotics, discusses getting death threats on social media weaponised against Tesla critics when she was appointed Safety Advisor at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Obsession with the Roman Empire is rife in Silicon Valley, and Musk’s purchase of Twitter provided the megaphone to augment his own sway. The need to call off the heat from a whole raft of legal action against Tesla, and criminal investigation over whether he misled consumers, prompted his shift to the right on the political spectrum and open support of Donald Trump, it is postulated here, in a move more strategic than ideological, after the Biden administration sought to regulate his companies, and the MAGA side presented a playing field where the sole barriers and guides were money. After all, at least five inspector generals investigating his companies were fired under Trump, and the Department of Government Evidence (DOGE) agency, headed by Musk.
Seeing himself as a messianic figure and a trans-humanist willing into being a future of AI-enabled super-human cognition, in which the death of the body would simply necessitate uploading into a new unit, Musk may be impatient to move past an inconveniently error-prone present on the seductive promise of revolutionised living. But the casualties of Tesla have other ideas, and no nine lives.
