Alex Gibney's documentary "Musk", which runs for 3 hours and 45 minutes, had its world premiere on 8 September in Venice and has just arrived in cinemas across the US. Universal holds the international rights, though it has not yet announced when the film will begin global distribution. The film is also set to air on HBO, which is expected to release a longer version in 2027. The director claims that a six-hour version also exists.
Musk did not participate in the film. Gibney's team created a computer-generated Musk who speaks directly to the camera, with the avatar's lip movements synchronised to the words using artificial intelligence. The avatar recites only what Musk has already said in previous interviews. Musk called Gibney a derogatory name on X before the director had even reached out to request an interview, and in recent weeks has written about him as an idiot. He called him an "awful man" and a tinfoil hat crackpot with "zero credibility". The film was branded an attack piece even at its announcement three years ago.
The film contains dozens of conversations with former colleagues, partners, and even Musk's father, as well as all the public statements Musk has made on his path to becoming the richest person in the world. Gibney did not start out as a critic of Musk — he had a Tesla Powerwall and Tesla solar panels at home, and was considering a Tesla for his garage. By the time he began working on the film, Musk was already the richest person in history. Gibney has always been most interested in power: how it is acquired, how it is used, and how it corrupts people, and Musk was the perfect face of 21st-century power. The turning point was Edward Niedermeyer's book "Ludicrous", which portrays Musk more as a purveyor of smoke and mirrors than as the genius depicted in Walter Isaacson's authorised biography.
In spring 2024, the film was nearly complete. At that point, it was primarily a two-hour business story focused on Twitter and Tesla's Autopilot. Musk had claimed for years that Autopilot was a system so advanced that a driver could doze off or play games, which was not true. Tesla used only cameras instead of more expensive lidar sensors, and the film links this decision to more than 60 fatal accidents. Gibney was finishing the two-hour version when Musk, following the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler in 2024, endorsed his candidacy. HBO executives encouraged the director to continue filming. The elections, DOGE, and the shutdown of USAID followed, which now make up the majority of the second half of the film.
After buying Twitter, Musk became angry at the Super Bowl because his tweet was not the most popular on the platform. Immediately after the game, he flew to the company's headquarters, gathered engineers, and kept them awake all night until the algorithm began prioritising his posts. The film is intercut with scenes from the 1937 British film "The Man Who Could Work Miracles", based on an H. G. Wells story about an ordinary man who gains the power to change reality and ultimately destroys the world by stopping the Earth's rotation. Musk's favourite book, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", begins with the destruction of Earth to make way for an interstellar highway.
Gibney was born in 1953, the son of journalist and writer Frank Gibney, and founded the production company Jigsaw Productions in 1982, which still stands behind his films. He won an Oscar for "Taxi to the Dark Side", a film about the torture of detainees in the war on terror. His films include "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room", a film about former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, "Going Clear" about Scientology, "We Steal Secrets" from 2013 about Julian Assange, films about Vladimir Putin and Russian influence networks, and "The Inventor" about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. Esquire has written that Gibney is becoming the most important documentarian of our time.
Running through almost all of Gibney's films is an idea called "the corruption of the noble purpose": the belief that the end justifies the means. Gibney explains that those who bypass rules in the name of a good cause become increasingly free over time, with more deception, while the noble purpose remains far behind. Holmes wanted to revolutionise medicine, the people at Enron wanted to restructure capitalism, and Musk, Gibney says, is a classic example: a man who saw himself as a saviour of the climate helped elect a president whose slogan was "Drill, baby, drill". Gibney does not know for certain whether power drew out the worst in Musk or corrupted him, but he knows that as Musk's power grew, he became increasingly selfish, impulsive, and childish.
