Gore Verbinski fires back at Elon Musk over AI movie spat: 'He's a traitor'

Verbinski's movie and Musk's social media platform have been squabbling online. Now, the director is weighing in.

If you haven’t seen director Gore Verbinski’s new sci-fi comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, the message is about as anti-AI as you can get. Basically, Sam Rockwell’s character travels from the future to stop a sentient AI system from enslaving all of humanity. Given a plotline like that, perhaps a conflict between Verbinski’s movie and Grok, Grok’s home on X (aka, Twitter), and X owner Elon Musk was inevitable. Now Verbinski himself has weighed in.

"He's a traitor," Verbinski says bluntly, adding that he sold his Tesla in response to Musk's activities.

Verbinski had even more to say about the former DOGE boss, but let's back up for a second to unpack this battle of words between the director of Mouse Hunt and the richest man in the world.

The spat began when X went down for an hour or so on Jan. 16. Once it came back online, the official account for Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die 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."

While hardly threatening or even remotely serious-sounding, the post prompted X’s official movie account to pull out of a press day. The official Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die account revealed an email from X that reads, "Flagging that the X (Movies) social team is backing out of the press list on Tuesday due to a tweet from the GLHFDD account."

The Good Luck account shared a screenshot of the email in a response to a recent Elon Musk quote about how funny Grok is, snarkily asking if this was the "Same guy who had the official X movies account pull out of our press day over a joke?"

Given the recent dust-up, when Polygon spoke with Gore Verbinski for the 15th anniversary of his animated film Rango, we wanted to see if he had an opinion of Elon Musk himself. As it turns out, he had some pretty strong words to share.

"He's a traitor. You had me with science and then you lost me with fascism." Verbinski says.

"There were believers early on," the director continues, suggesting he was one of them. "I had to get rid of my Tesla."

One can only guess how hilarious Grok's reply will be to this.