Alex Gibney, the filmmaker behind documentaries on Enron, Elizabeth Holmes and Vladimir Putin, has turned his lens on the world's richest man. Musk, which runs three hours and 45 minutes plus a 10-minute intermission, opened in US theatres on October 16 after screenings at the Venice Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival. Musk himself is not a fan, accusing Gibney of assembling a "hit list" of critics, and his lawyer has threatened a defamation suit over a text exchange with former girlfriend Ashley St Clair.
The film traces Musk from co-founding Zip2 in 1995 through the Twitter takeover, his Department of Government Efficiency stint, and his rise to becoming the first trillionaire. Gibley's verdict, delivered at Venice: this is not a new tech story but an old one — the confidence man and stock pumper, a lineage he likens to Enron and Theranos. He has called Musk's influence "extremely dangerous to world democracy".
Musk declined to participate, so Gibney built an uncanny AI-generated digital avatar of him, lip-synced to his real statements, and framed the whole film with a video game motif — complete with a first-person shooter sequence where a cartoon Musk wields a chainsaw during the DOGE cuts. Reviewers at TIFF say the length flies by, largely because the film weaves together Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink and Grok into a single character study rather than dropping bombshell revelations.
The most uncomfortable material comes from Musk's personal life. First wife Justine Musk describes a marriage of control and gaslighting; Grimes appears briefly amid a custody battle; and St Clair alleges she was offered $15 million plus $100,000 a month for 21 years to sign an NDA over their son. The film counts 14 known children and suggests the number is likely higher, pointing to a compound in Austin built for the extended family.
On the business side, Gibney contrasts Musk's public claims with reality: the sole battery-swap station ever built, a self-driving demo later revealed to depend on an engineer coding in the passenger seat, and footage of fatal Autopilot crashes allegedly linked to more than 60 deaths. The political pivot gets airtime too, with interviewees arguing Musk's embrace of Donald Trump in 2024 was driven by a raft of federal investigations into his companies. The result, per TIFF reviewer Travis M. Andrews, is an engrossing, unsettling portrait that leaves judgement to the audience — while St Clair offers hers bluntly: "Elon is a nuke."