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Is there anything more to know about the world’s richest man? And more importantly, do you want to know it? Elon Musk is such a titanic figure—in both the size and the shipwreck sense—that Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary Musk, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday and heads next to Toronto before opening in U.S. theaters on Oct. 16, doesn’t have enough space to be comprehensive. (Where, for example, is the fact that Musk, according to the book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, bears such an intense antipathy for the number nine that he wouldn’t allow it to appear on Tesla’s website?) And it’s far too long for the casually interested, if there is anyone left who has not yet formed an opinion of this messianic monster. But perhaps it is for those who know that Musk is bad, but not how bad, or who don’t quite grasp how he, and we, got to the point where he became one of history’s most powerful figures, and one of its most unhinged.
Although Musk’s career stretches back three decades, Gibney’s telling is evenly split into pre- and post-Trump—or, more precisely, pre- and post-COVID, when it became clear that Musk’s alliance with the MAGA-fied Republican Party was far more intense than garden-variety advocacy for lower taxes and less regulation. As much as the documentary’s second half sounds a series of increasingly urgent alarms, its first half might be the most useful, at least for those who find it difficult to imagine, or recall, a time when Musk was near-universally lauded and didn’t spend a good chunk of his days trolling the internet for mass adulation. Gibney takes us through Musk’s earliest success in Silicon Valley as a 23-year-old co-founder of the company Zip2—roughly an online equivalent of the Yellow Pages—whose sale netted him a $20 million–plus payout despite the fact that Musk’s code was so gnarly and inelegant that the company’s programmers referred to his contributions as “hair balls.” His subsequent tenure as PayPal’s CEO was brief—a matter of months, ended when the board had him removed from his position in the middle of his honeymoon—but he walked away with enough cash to start SpaceX, which is where Musk’s legend really began to take hold. By 2010, when the company, after several fiery failures, completed its first launch and return of an uncrewed capsule, he’d already achieved, or persuaded others to grant him, the status of a one-man nation-state. As a news report at the time put it, only four “entities” had successfully carried out a similar feat: the U.S., Russia, China, and Elon Musk.
The penchant for treating founders as god-kings whose companies are mere extensions of their visionary genius is a large part of the story underlying Musk’s (and others’) precipitous rise, but it’s not only a credulous media and easily swayed investors who are to blame. In one especially telling episode, Musk invests in the electric-car startup Tesla, accuses its co-founder and CEO Martin Eberhard of fraud, then settles a libel lawsuit from Eberhard with the explicit stipulation that Musk be allowed to falsely call himself one of the company’s original founders. (He made his first investment six months after Tesla was incorporated.) He claimed that zero-emission vehicles were part of his mission to stave off ecological collapse while exploiting tax credits for a battery-swap technology he knew was unworkable at scale. He also pushed self-driving technology that has been implicated in dozens of fatal crashes. In a deposition in one lawsuit over a 2018 crash, Ashok Elluswamy, the director of Tesla’s Autopilot software, said that the company knowingly released a promotional video that presented self-driving’s potential as if it had already been realized, effectively selling science fiction as science fact. “Could it be,” Gibney’s narration asks, “that the world’s richest man was also its most flamboyant fraud?”
We know much of what happened next—how Musk, a man to whom no one says no, was enraged by COVID lockdowns and the spread of what he called the “woke mind virus”; how he pickled his brain in Twitter’s right-wing ooze and bought the company to make sure others would follow suit. (According to the book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, by 2024, he was posting to the site an average of 60 times a day, and sometimes as often as 40 times an hour.) He is certainly not the first man, rich or otherwise, to feel that the world owes him its attention. But few have had the ability to so directly influence how, and how often, the public pays attention to him. At one point, infuriated that Joe Biden’s Super Bowl tweet had gotten more likes than his, Musk ordered 80 engineers to work through the night making changes to Twitter’s algorithm, eventually inserting the identifier “author_is_elon” to ensure that his thoughts were boosted above all others.
It’s clear that Musk, along with much of the MAGA right, was radicalized by the pandemic-era imperative to endure personal hardship for the public good. Never one to accept what he saw as excuses from subordinates, he found on Twitter an endless stream of pseudo-information to rationalize his own biases, the ultimate resource for a man who had come to believe that his own gut was the most reliable source of all. He discovered that his most unrestrained statements—which is to say, often, his most racist or sexist or simply cracked—got the biggest response, and he followed the trail his followers laid out for him. (As Muskism points out, he is unusual, if not unique, among the site’s most popular users in that roughly three-quarters of his posts are replies.) In Musk, podcaster Sam Harris recalls how, after Musk tweeted that the coronavirus “panic” was “dumb,” he tried to get the site’s owner, for his own sake, to walk back the statement. After hours of texting back and forth, Musk climaxed with a billionaire mic drop, betting Harris a million of his dollars that there would never be 35,000 cases of COVID infection in the U.S. Harris waited until the death toll alone was over 35,000—with cases well past half a million—before reminding Musk of his error. “And that, honestly, appears to have been the end of our friendship.”
Yet Musk is at its most illuminating when it pushes back on, or at least complicates, the narrative that Musk was fine until his brain was broken by the pandemic. It might have sharpened his sense of entitlement, and his vastly increasing fortune may have given him more ability to reshape the work to his liking. But Musk’s ex-wife Justine, whom he married in 2000 and divorced in 2008, says the man the world began to see in 2020 was the one she’d always known. According to Justine, he used the occasion of the first dance at their wedding to remind her that he was “the alpha” in their marriage, and would twist their arguments so she would somehow constantly end up in the wrong. It was through their relationship, Justine says, that she learned the word gaslighting.
Ashley St. Clair, the conservative influencer whose DMs Musk slid into in 2023, wound up in a two-year relationship with Musk during which she gave birth to their son, Romulus. But she also watched over his shoulder as he texted with his ex-wife Claire Boucher, who performs futurist pop under the name Grimes, and responded to her desperate requests to see their son, X, by blocking her. Later, after St. Clair publicly rebuked Musk and his beliefs, especially his treatment of his and Justine’s trans daughter, Vivian, Musk slashed St. Clair’s child support payments by 60 percent. (She appears to be at least skirting the edges of her NDA in talking to Gibney, and states on camera that she can’t say anything about his alleged drug use.)
Not surprisingly, Musk never responded to Gibney’s interview requests. But he appears in Musk anyway—through file footage, but also as his own A.I.-enhanced avatar. The visual gimmick riffs on Musk’s contention that the world itself may be a computer simulation and positions him as its one true being, a video-game protagonist who can change character classes and snag power-ups as often as he wants to. Musk, whose Grok chatbot has been known to strip real-life women nude (and much worse) with a single prompt, has more than earned this A.I.-slop indignity, but it still comes off as a bit of boomer cringe, even if the avatar’s dialogue is all taken from Musk’s own statements. Musk might find the tactic outrageous, or he might get a kick out of his digitally glowed-up self. (Unlike his real-life counterpart, the virtual Elon’s hairline never budges.) But either way, it makes him feel like an almost mythical being, a ghost in the machine that is still grinding most of us to bits. As insightful as it is on the problem of Musk himself, Gibney’s movie is so fixed on presenting him as an extinction-level threat that he glosses over the way Musk is just a particularly pernicious symptom of a much larger and more lasting rot. He might be the world’s richest man, but someday someone else will be, and if we continue to let wealth inequality grow and valorize strongman posturing over strength of character, there’s no reason why the next Musk might not be just as bad, if not worse.
