Wealth & Money Quote by Alex Gibney

Gibney’s line reads like a journalist’s mantra sharpened into a filmmaker’s threat: if you want the truth, stop listening to what a society says about itself and trace what it pays for and what it hides. “Follow the money” is the classic investigative breadcrumb, but pairing it with “follow the secrets” widens the target from corruption to culture. Budgets and bribes tell you who benefits; secrets tell you what a society can’t afford to admit, even to itself.

The intent is practical, not philosophical. Gibney isn’t offering a moral lesson so much as a method for cutting through PR, ideology, and the soothing fiction of “values.” Money is measurable power: it maps incentives, exposes capture, and reveals the real constituency of institutions that claim neutrality. Secrets are the other half of that equation: nondisclosure agreements, classified programs, private settlements, offshore structures, “internal investigations.” They’re the social cost of maintaining a public narrative.

The subtext is cynical in a specific, modern way. In an era of manufactured transparency (corporate “purpose,” political messaging, curated vulnerability), what matters is the machinery behind the performance. Secrets aren’t an aberration; they’re structural. They indicate where legitimacy would break if the full story surfaced.

Contextually, this is a documentarian’s worldview forged in the post-Watergate, post-9/11, post-financial-crisis landscape Gibney has chronicled: systems don’t just fail; they protect themselves. His sentence is an instruction to look for the hidden ledger where power keeps its real accounts.