The Six Billion Dollar Man

Relentless in his mission, Julian Assange made enemies at the highest levels. The Six Billion Dollar Man shows the information revolution that the Australian WikiLeaks founder unleashed and details what happened behind the scenes to stop him.

Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight, The Trials of Henry Kissinger) begins his account in 2010, the year in which a series of high-profile data dumps definitively put the whistleblower website WikiLeaks on the map. The world began to realize not only the scale of the abuses committed by the US military, but also how for years we had been looking at smokescreens put up by world leaders.

Alongside friends and colleagues—some with hidden agendas—former ministers and heads of state appear on camera. Secret footage from the embassy where Assange was hiding underscores the extreme pressure he lived under for years. Jarecki’s film continues to resonate as a warning of a universal problem: if you want the truth, you have to fight for it.