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‘Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for the greatest capitalist in the history of the United States of America.’
So an announcer screams early on in Musk, Alex Gibney’s exhaustive (and exhausting) investigation into the richest man on the planet. Give it up? You’ll probably come out of this deflated and depressed. ‘How could Musk assume so much power and why did we give it to him?’ Gibney asks. Why indeed?
Unveiled at this year’s Venice Film Festival, the first thing you should know about Musk is that it’s almost four hours long. That’s a lot of time spent looking at Elon Musk, the man behind SpaceX and Tesla who many believe trashed Twitter and then decimated U.S. government departments via DOGE.
There’s a 10-minute intermission, giving you a chance to catch your breath in this relentless rampage through Musk’s life.
Unsurprisingly, Gibney, who has previously dug into the likes of WikiLeaks, Enron and disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, doesn’t get Musk on camera. ‘Gibney is a d****e,’ Musk wrote on Twitter, when he first heard about the film.
Instead, Gibney does something weird and not entirely successful: l He uses a sort of CG-created Musk to deliver some of the things he’s said in public.
He also features an animated Musk zapping people like they’re in a video game, and at one point picking up a chainsaw (echoing the fact that, in reality, Argentine President Javier Milei gifted him one).
But Gibney does get a lot of intriguing people to spill the beans, including Musk’s first wife Justine and influencer Ashley St. Clair, who had a baby with him before going public with the news.
Are these just people with axes to grind? Maybe. Gibney doesn’t exactly spotlight people queuing up to sing his praises. But he does a credible job of showing how Musk rose to power: the ‘wiz kid’ who rode the dot.com boom, making millions before embarking on his mission to build rockets with SpaceX and electric vehicles with Tesla.
As Musk himself characterises his contributions, he didn’t invent patents, but he ‘was a skilled inventor of his own value’.
Musk sourced some of his crazier notions from science fiction, something Gibney initially admired. ‘I liked his ambition,’ he admits in the film, although it becomes clear as the film progresses that Gibney’s admiration didn’t last long.
The film digs deep into his failures, including the lawsuits over fatalities allegedly caused by Tesla’s Autopilot (or self-driving systems). His childhood in South Africa also gets raked over, with anecdotes about his tough-love father, Errol, berating him after he got beaten up by a gang of boys, dwelled upon considerably.
The really creepy stuff comes in Musk’s personal life, and the ‘legion of children’ he has sired (14 publicly known, but there may be more). It’s an obsession with procreation, suggests one interviewee, while Justine calls all the women who he has babies with ‘the breeders’.
His fallout with daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson, who changed both her name and gender, is particularly ugly, as is the way he steers son X, one of three kids he has with ex-partner Grimes, away from the singer.
Whether or not you’ll want to commit to the bum-numbing run-time will depend on how much billionaire bull**** you think you can stand.
The second half, with subtitles like ‘The Mad Techno King’ really does hammer home his madness, from flaunting public health mandates during Covid-19 to keep his Tesla factories open, to using DOGE to strip down foreign aid body USAID.
‘Elon is a nuke,’ says St. Clair at one point in the film. And if he sees this movie, he probably will explode.
Musk is scheduled to receive a theatrical release in North America on October 16 before becoming available for streaming on HBO internationally.
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