Gore Verbinski, director of the top anti-AI film of 2026, calls out Elon Musk as a ‘traitor.’

If you haven’t caught director Gore Verbinski’s new sci-fi comedy, *Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die*, it’s packed with an anti-AI message. The story follows Sam Rockwell’s character as he journeys from the future to prevent a sentient AI from enslaving humanity. With a premise like that, a clash between Verbinski’s film and Grok, the AI on X (formerly Twitter), along with its owner Elon Musk, seemed almost destined. Verbinski has now shared his thoughts on the matter.

“He’s a traitor,” Verbinski stated plainly, mentioning that he sold his Tesla due to Musk’s actions.

Verbinski had more to say about the former DOGE boss, but let’s rewind a bit to understand this verbal sparring between the director of *Mouse Hunt* and one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet.

The exchange kicked off when X experienced an outage for about an hour on January 16. Once the platform was back up, the official account for *Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die* quipped, “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 the tweet was lighthearted and not at all menacing, it led to X’s official movie account withdrawing from a press day. The *Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die* account later shared an email from X stating, “Flagging that the X (Movies) social team is backing out of the press list on Tuesday due to a tweet from the GLHFDD account.”

In response to a recent comment from Musk about how amusing Grok is, the *Good Luck* account cheekily asked if this was the “Same guy who had the official X movies account pull out of our press day over a joke?”

Given this recent back-and-forth, when Polygon caught up with Gore Verbinski to celebrate the 15th anniversary of his animated film *Rango*, we were curious about his thoughts on Elon Musk. It turns out he had some strong opinions.

“He’s a traitor. You had me with science and then you lost me with fascism,” Verbinski remarked.

“There were believers early on,” he added, implying he was among them. “I had to get rid of my Tesla.”

It’ll be interesting to see how Grok responds to this.