There was a time, not so long ago, when Elon Musk seemed relatively innocuous. Just another Silicon Valley tech guy with a fat wallet and a cheap haircut. Nothing to get worked up about. Many of us now long for those halcyon days – when Musk was barely distinguishable from his peers rather than a megalomaniac responsible for the destruction of first Twitter.com then multiple government departments. All things considered, it’s perhaps a surprise that Alex Gibney took so long to make a film about him, given the US documentarian’s penchant for needling at controversial figures in his homeland. Better late than never; he arrives to Elon Musk’s story armed with a clutch of damning interviews and a gimmick which doesn’t quite work as well as Gibney seems to think it does.
Musk got off to a rocky start when it began production in 2023, with the project immediately denounced as “probably a hit piece” by its very subject on Twitter. Gibney replied “How would you know?” so Musk – ever the cunning linguist – called him a douche. Gibney pokes fun at the interaction within the first five minutes of the documentary, before using Musk’s antagonistic attitude as the reason for going a different route. Using a database containing everything Musk has ever said publicly, Gibney explains his team created a facsimile version of the alleged trillionaire styled after a video game character and use him as a talking head. It’s not quite clarified in the film if this was made using generative AI (if so, it somewhat undercuts the point Gibney makes later about Musk’s own data centres’ environmental impact) and seems superfluous given that there’s a wealth of footage of Musk saying plenty of damning things without creating a puppet to do it for him.
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Perhaps it helps reenforce the idea that Musk has “gamefied” the entire US political and financial system, but Gibney’s stylistic choice to frame the entire 225-minute film with the trappings of a video game does seem bizarre given Musk isn’t a particularly high profile gamer (he’s more into posting cringey tweets and memes). Nevertheless, Gibney finds a way to make an almost four-hour film about an odious man zip by, aided by snappy editing and a few well-judged uses of pop music.
The film is divided into short chapters which cover different facets of the Musk story, from his first success as the founder of Zip2 to his troubling obsession with having children with as many women as possible in order to create a “legion”. (Musk notes there are 14 confirmed mini-Musks so far, though potentially many more hidden away by powerful NDAs.) The fact that Gibney barely touches on Musk’s heritage in a film of this length speaks to the many, many other noteworthy diabolical things he’s done, though it’s something of a coup that he has Elon’s father Errol on record, cheerfully recalling how badly bullied his son was at school.
Gibney is happy for the material to do most of the talking; or rather, for his excellent interviewees to paint a picture of who Elon Musk really is, from his first wife Justine Musk to Space X founding member Jim Cantrell and former friend Sam Harris. The candid interviews are always interesting and frequently damning, if not frustrating because one gets the creeping sense that every opportunity to call Musk out on his bullshit was squandered until he was too big to fail.
This comes into sharpest focus in the film’s second half, when Gibney focuses on Musk’s political career. Here Musk outlines how his brief foray into US politics bankrolling Donald Trump essentially enabled Musk to remove the checks and balances that existed to oversee a businessman like him, and lays out the worrying implications for what he might have gained while running riot as an unelected official in the most powerful home in America.
It’s a damning and maddening film, crafted with Gibney’s typical vigor and thoroughness, that neatly lays out exactly what the problems are with Elon Musk in accessible terms that will hopefully resonate with a general audience. The extremely online have probably heard it all before, but a HBO-backed documentary which comprehensively lays out what exactly the problem is feels necessary in a time where the truth feels easier than ever to hide. Although a little overlaboured in its styling, Musk zips from one calamity to the next with ease, and allows Musk’s own actions to speak to what sort of a person he is. The film might not tell the whole story, but Gibney knows where to focus his attention, and hopefully it’s not too late to convince viewers to do the same.