Gore Verbinski calls Elon Musk 'a traitor' over AI movie spat

Gore Verbinski’s new sci-fi comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is openly anti-AI: Sam Rockwell’s character travels from the future to stop a sentient AI system from enslaving humanity.

The spat began after X went down for about an hour on Jan. 16. When it returned, the film’s official account joked, "Free screening for @elonmusk and any of your tech oligarch buddies. We can neither confirm nor deny Sam Rockwell was responsible for the outage earlier." X’s movies team then pulled out of a press day, and the film shared a screenshot of an email flagging that decision.

Asked during an interview for the 15th anniversary of his animated film Rango, Verbinski was blunt: "He's a traitor." He added, "You had me with science and then you lost me with fascism," and said, "I had to get rid of my Tesla."

Given the film’s premise and the online exchanges between the movie’s account and X, the disagreement has become a public back-and-forth involving the director and Musk’s platform.

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