Among its other qualities, Alex Gibney’s “Musk” might be the only take on this material that gets you thinking about Mao Zedong — or, more specifically, thinking about an apocryphal quote attributed to Chen Yun: “Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal…”
Had Gibney ended his film at the 90-minute mark, his subject’s achievements would have seemed immortal. Had it run three hours, he’d still be a “great” man, if flawed. But Gibney takes it to four hours. Alas, what can one say?
That progression, of course, charts a linear chronology, tracking Elon Musk’s public reputation from the late 1990s through to his 83 tweets today. The trouble lies with what comes next. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival before lodging itself, like a Neuralink, in your brain, Gibney’s punishing doc is meant to spur nightmares, though it takes some time getting there.
All the while, the filmmaker keeps us alert and on edge, opening his opus with an image of the Earth exploding and returning to that grim vision several more times. Before the film unfurls its barrage of interviews, archival clips and cheeky animations, Gibney lays out a scathing, skeptical thesis that serves as a roadmap.
“How has Elon Musk assumed so much power,” he asks in voice over. “And why did we give it to him?”
“Musk” then shifts to narrative throat clearing, giving us two hours of biographical broad strokes. Moving from business venture to business venture, from Zip2 to PayPal to Tesla, the film charts a trajectory of upward failing, underscoring a sub-thesis that Musk was, and remains, above all an inventor of his own value. A BS artist, in other words, whose real genius lies in self marketing, arriving at the best and worst of times, depending who’s left holding the bag. Should that call to mind another predominant public figure, well, congratulations on waking up from a three-year coma.
Someone with that precise affliction would likely make for this film’s ideal viewer, pointing to the central problem of spotlighting our era’s most inescapable media figure. What else is there to say about a man who’s spent a vast fortune imposing himself on your life? Denied a direct interview, Gibney responds with a digital, AI assisted Elon avatar, addressing the “camera” from a gaming rig, his head subtly enlarged to the point of uncanniness.
That the Elon Avatar only speaks in publicly sourced soundbites reinforces a sense of grim déjà vu. Such media ubiquity is a double edged sword, making a subject all the more relevant for scrutiny while neutering the effect of any archival material. Bereft of unseen footage, Gibney still lands a pair of open-nerve interviews with Elon co-parents Justine Musk and Ashley St. Clair. That one is an ex wife and the other a legally finessed baby mama, apparently one of many, only reinforces the subject’s inhuman ascent.
Split into nearly 20 chapters, the sprawling film toggles between the personal and professional, revealing, to little surprise, a callous partner and parent while detailing at length Tesla’s corporate malfeasance. And that’s all before a 10-minute intermission, which gives way to an even more scabrous second half. Picking up in 2020, “Musk” finds a man broken by the pandemic who then reshapes our shared world in his own jagged self image.
Using footage we already know by heart, Gibney moves toward Trump 2.0, with the film finding its surest footing in detailing the bedlam wrought by DOGE. As a forward facing document, “Musk” only gets cooking well past the three-hour mark, revealing the vast, lethal impact, apparently 14 million strong with 4.5 million cases of infant mortality, of his USAID cuts. The film’s extensive use of post-2025 material sears by way of immediacy, turning so-called archival footage into something barely cooled from the present, fresh enough to sting like salt in an open wound.
And then we arrive at the here and now, stripping away any small comfort of the not-so-distant past. “Elon is a nuke,” says Ashley St. Clair, forcing us to reckon with the current, unprecedented reality of a single man wielding vast military, telecommunication, legal, commercial, financial and cultural power. For his part, Gibney, who started work on this film well before 2024 and did not stop adding to it until hours before the Venice screening, offers no easy endings. Returning to his pet image of the planet engulfed and inflamed, the filmmaker closes on an apocalyptic note that not so subtly reframes all that came before.
Whereas viewers might spend the ample runtime wondering just who stands to benefit from such a recent and immediate archive of material readily and regrettably available, the film’s grim coda casts “Musk” in starker light. Here is work meant less for us than for posterity, an ongoing obituary for a world and a global order in palliative care.
“Musk” will be released by Bleecker Street on Oct. 16.
