Director: Alex Gibney
Writer: Alex Gibney, Michael J. Palmer
Stars: Elon Musk, Justine Musk, Ashley St. Clair
Synopsis: A thorough and unvarnished analysis of Elon Musk, a technology billionaire who serves as the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter.
255 minutes (including a 10-minute intermission) of talking about Elon Musk may be the most daunting thing documentarian Alex Gibney has ever accomplished. Who in their right mind would watch a documentary like this, even one that doesn’t necessarily flatter the subject? I’m still trying to wrap my head around why Musk needed to be this long, because the documentary is so surface-level that it rarely justifies its runtime, aside from a non-linear Wikipedia summary of some of his biggest accomplishments and most controversial decisions. That said, the film is still angry enough to pull us into a portrait of one of the world’s most polarizing figures, for better or worse.
Gibney, acting as his own narrator, explains that the man himself never wanted a sit-down interview with the movie’s documentarian, instead publicly calling him a “douche” on X, the Everything App (ugh). Because of this, and largely because of Musk’s own obsession with Artificial Intelligence, Gibney “creates” an AI-powered version of the SpaceX CEO that lets him say whatever the hell he wants. It might sound like an ingenious framing device to guide the audience from segment to segment (there are many, not necessarily in a “cradle-to-the-present” structure). Still, the AI at the center of it all is particularly jarring.
Yes, I know it’s meant to “intentionally” look chintzy, like all of the disgusting slop Grok creates daily (the film, among many subjects, exposes how Grok’s AI never had any guardrails from the jump and was easily able to “undress” photos of women, including children, on the app, if one asked, or even answer questions through the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler). But it feels particularly strange that Gibney would take this route, given how he calls out the (environmental and noise) pollution Musk’s own xAI data centers emit near the end of the documentary. Isn’t it a little hypocritical to say AI is so bad while using it to make the movie? According to Gibney, AI was used only to mimic Musk’s voice and “animate” the CGI Elon they created. Still, even then, it contradicts one of the biggest elements your documentary is vehemently against.
Still, there is a lot to process in this mammoth of an object, starting with how Gibney peels every layer of Elon’s behavior with a scalpel. Of course, he will start with humble beginnings – what he contributed to before being known as the “founder” (he isn’t) of Tesla and SpaceX, and, obviously, before all of the enshittification of the internet via his acquisition of Twitter and eventual “friendship” with U.S. President Donald J. Trump. Who was Elon before all of this? The consensus among people interviewed who knew him personally (including ex-wife Justine Musk) isn’t very positive. But the most revealing part of the film’s first section is the relationship he and his siblings had with their father, Errol, who, unlike his son, agreed to be interviewed for the documentary.
I have no idea what this says about Errol’s willingness to “set the record straight” about himself or his son, but Gibney paints him in an even less positive light than Elon. The way that he tells a story about how he, in his own words, killed “three Black men” who were invading their home in South Africa is genuinely bone-chilling. He recounts that moment with such casualness that it almost seems like it was a normal event, even though Gibney links this incident as crucial in our understanding of Elon’s own behavior, and how his relationship with his father has never been something he’s enjoyed talking about, never mind his “origin story” when he grew up in Pretoria.
Then there’s Elon’s obsession with creating a “legion of children,” which comes before Gibney starts talking about his right-wing turn. Revelations from Justine and ex-girlfriend Ashley St. Clair about the extent of his non-relationship with the children he helped conceive (the number is not well-known, but some believe he might have over 100 kids) will make you sick to your stomach, especially when the two begin to discuss how Vivian Jenna Wilson’s transition contributed to his belief that the “woke mind virus” should be “exterminated.” Musk paints him as a sad, lonely individual whose views on the world alienated the people closest to him and harmed so many in the process. St. Clair was a prominent figure in modern-day conservatism until her experience with Musk made her rethink her beliefs.
She now deeply regrets her MAGA activism (she conceived the “dark MAGA” or “dark gothic MAGA” hats Musk wore on the campaign trail, as he jumps around like an idiot and yells “HAUUUUUUUUUUUUGH!” in front of thousands of brainwashed cult members) and has since joined the Democratic Socialists of America. You’ve probably heard this stuff before, but hearing it from St. Clair herself, as she looks back on the most harrowing parts of her life, is far more powerful than any tweet or report you’ve read.
But what about his business endeavors? After all, Musk is saving the environment by heavily promoting electric cars and making them mainstream, right?!? Right, cars that crash all the time after he made consumers believe they can be fully automated when the feature wasn’t perfected, or spaceships that promise total colonization of a planet inhospitable to the human race and keep blowing up. One of the most damning sections of the film occurs as Gibney examines endless accidents that were caused by Tesla’s “automation” features, which barely recognize the environment the car is supposed to analyze, and keep coming back to the first-person image of a “self-driving” Tesla crashing – and killing – two people whom the product’s system saw, but instead of stopping, fully shut down.
This horrifying image is essentially a metaphor for everything Musk touches, from Twitter, which suddenly became a cesspool of (paid) misinformation and explicit imagery with zero guardrails, to any department that was permanently affected by 19- and 20-year-old buffoons working with him to dismantle the American economy through Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). He’s a man who touts himself as the ultimate visionary akin to Iron Man (of course, his cameo in Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2 is touched upon), but can never reach the brilliance of Tony Stark’s inventions. If anything, Gibney draws Musk as a simple-minded fool who will never accomplish anything of note in his life, and will never be liked by the people that matter, including his own family.
It’s a fairly scathing portrait of a man who so desperately wants to be lauded as the “inventor” he thinks he is, but is, in fact, a massive and total fraud. Perhaps you didn’t need an entire documentary to discuss this, especially when it’s unfolding before our very eyes. That said, the movie’s post-intermission section is probably its most accomplished part, because it explains in great detail why Musk’s “hardcore” approach to employment has failed, and why his political aspirations have also spectacularly backfired. It’s hard to know exactly what type of person Elon Musk might have been if he lived a normal, stable life and if he didn’t have delusions of grandeur, but we’ll never be able to assess, since his egotism is what made him the center of attention, even if we desperately don’t want to hear about him anymore.
Because of this, it’s hard not to feel spectacularly burnt out (and pissed off) at what Gibney lays out in his almost four-hour film. The exhaustion stems from the runtime, of course, but also from how each section builds on the last and feeds into who we think Musk is. Remove the AI slop, and you might have the most essential text for understanding the man’s pettiness. However, the fact that billionaire oligarchs are currently censoring advertisements for the film on social media platforms, and that Musk himself has called the documentary a “hit piece,” should tell you everything you need to know about what you will find inside Gibney’s evisceration of the world’s biggest and most embarrassing loser.
