TORONTO — Nearly four hours with Elon Musk.
That’s Alex Gibney’s proposal.
The filmmaker, once described by Esquire as “becoming the most important documentarian of our time,” has tackled Enron, Eliot Spitzer, Vladimir Putin and Elizabeth Holmes. Now, he’s turned his eyes to the richest man in the history of the world.
The three-hour-and-forty-five minute “Musk” (plus a 10-minute intermission) hits theaters on Oct. 16, but it’s already causing a stir.
The documentary, which spans from his early Silicon Valley days through his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dalliances and Twitter acquisition to his ascent to becoming the world’s first trillionaire, paints Musk as an emotionally unstable grifter with more power and influence than perhaps any other human who has ever lived.
Gibney pulls no punches, neither in the documentary nor in interviews about it, in which he’s called Musk’s power and influence “extremely dangerous to world democracy.”
“What I discovered was that the story of Musk was not a new tech story,” Gibney told reporters in a news conference at the Venice Film Fest earlier this month, adding that it’s “really the story of an old wine in a new bottle. His story turns out to be the story of the confidence man, the stock pumper. His wealth and power comes from inflated stock, and so I had told that story before with Enron and with Elizabeth Holmes, and so it was a story that was oddly familiar to me.”
As you might expect, Musk is not exactly flattered by the depiction.
“Gibney just assembled a hit list of people who either have an axe to grind or don’t even know me (but still have an axe to grind),” he tweeted last week. “He has ZERO integrity. Horrible human.”
Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, sent Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions a letter threatening to file a defamation suit, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The claims center on a text exchange between Musk and Ashley St. Clair, a former girlfriend with whom he has a child, which is presented in the film.
In the exchange, Musk tells St. Clair he’s feeling more optimistic about the 2024 election, in which he supported President Donald Trump, because “tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.” He adds, “I have over 10 thousand lasers in space right now.”
I caught “Musk” at a 9 a.m. press and market screening at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday. There’s a tremendous amount to parse, but here are a few immediate takeaways.
Yes, it’s long. It earns the run-time.
Sunday’s screening began at 9 a.m. and let out at 1 p.m. If I hadn’t looked at a clock, I might have guessed about two hours had passed.
Gibney’s film moves fluidly, though. It helps that it’s deeply comprehensive, beginning with Musk co-founding Zip2 in 1995 and running through the Department of Defense’s embrace of Grok earlier this summer.
The movie doesn’t hit the audience with any atom bombs of new information. Instead, it weaves all the random strings of Musk’s empire and life with which you likely have a vague familiarity — Tesla, SpaceX, his extreme pronatalism, his shifting politics, Grok, Twitter, DOGE, Starlink — into a stark character study of a man who may have once been a true believer in futurism and helping humanity.
But who, as presented by the documentary, has become a power-hungry megalomaniacal con man with a God complex.
An AI-generated Musk and a video game motif
The movie begins with Musk discussing simulation theory, the idea that we’re all actually living in a computer simulation. To explain why he believes this could be true, he points to the rapid advancement of video games from Pong to hyperrealistic, dynamic massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) that thousands of people around the globe play simultaneously. If we can make that leap in 50 years, he reasons, how could we not have already reached a point of creating a true simulation of life?
When the documentary was first announced, before Gibney approached Musk for an interview, the tech titan tweeted, “Gibney is a douche.” You can safely assume he does not participate in the film.
As a work-around, Gibney turned to Musk’s interest in the simulation theory, feeding AI every public statement Musk has made and then generating an uncanny, eerie, animated digital avatar of Musk to speak the very words fed into it.
Gibney takes things further, using a video game motif throughout the movie (a nod to Musk’s adoration of gaming). When Musk is making massive cuts throughout the federal government as the head of DOGE, for example, the movie turns into a first-person shooter video game in which Musk yields an animated chainsaw.
Musk’s private (oh, so private) life
The most emotionally fraught aspects of the film come during interviews with Musk’s former romantic partners.
His first wife, Justine Musk, with whom he had six children, said she learned the term “gaslighting” through their relationship.
Their first child, Nevada, died of sudden infant death syndrome 10 weeks after birth. In November 2022, Musk tweeted, “My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat.”
But Justine says that she, in fact, was holding Nevada.
In a shaky voice, Justine says it wasn’t uncommon for the Musk to bend reality and present it as truth, to criticize her, to try to control her. While dancing on their wedding night, Musk told her, “I am the alpha in this relationship.”
“He would invent the arena of the conversation and knock you out of it,” she says, adding that their marriage was “war, peace, war, peace.”
“I am your wife, not your employee,” she recalls telling him again and again. Then, she recalls his response: “If you were my employee, I would fire you.”
According to St. Clair, the former MAGA influencer with whom Musk has a child, Musk tries desperately to keep his private life private. Musk offered her $15 million and $100,000 a month for 21 years to sign a non-disclosure agreement requiring her not to share the paternity of her son Romulus with anyone except Romulus himself.
Musk first approached her via Twitter, which she says is not unusual for him. She says she’s since heard from many other young women whom Musk approached on Twitter with the offer to donate his sperm to them in his ardent pronatalist attempt to populate the world with his offspring.
“It’s like a Gatling gun of sperm in his DMs,” she says.
The musician Grimes, with whom he shares three children, also briefly appears in the documentary. While they were having their second child together, Musk secretly had twins with colleague Shivon Zilis via in vitro fertilization.
Grimes and Musk later had a custody battle over their three children, whom Grimes claimed he took from her.
One of Musk’s goals, the documentary posits, is to have as many children as possible. He texted St. Clair he wants to create “a legion of children before the civil war.”
In a voice-over, Gibney says there are 14 known children of Musk’s but likely many more. Musk has built a compound in Austin for the children and their mothers.
His thinking, according to tech journalist Kara Swisher: “I have superior genes, and I need to procreate.”
Musk’s parents also appear in the documentary. His father Errol, it should be noted, told the Sun in 2022 that “The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce.” He was defending having a second child with his stepdaughter. (You read that correctly.) Errol describes his son’s childhood as one rife with bullying and beatdowns.
His mother, Maye, meanwhile describes a chaotic household in which Errol would tell her three times a day how stupid and ugly she was, before occasionally beating her.
‘Skilled inventor of his own value’
One of Gibney’s tricks as a filmmaker is both showing how Musk presents his businesses and accomplishments before showing the reality of them.
“He was a skilled inventor of his own value,” Gibney says in voice-over.
One of the film’s lengthier subjects focuses on Tesla, showing several incongruities between public statement and actual fact.
During one presentation, Musk claims to have solved the biggest hurdle electric cars face — a limited battery life — by creating stations that quickly swap out the thousand-plus-pound battery for another. The film then cuts to the only actual station that was ever built, a pilot one in Harris Ranch, California.
Gibney’s main interest in Tesla, though, is the Musk’s frequent claims that the cars could simply drive themselves. He shows multiple clips of Musk saying you can play video games or take a nap and let the car drive. He shows the famous “Paint It Black” video, which supposedly demonstrated this technology, only have a former Tesla engineer admit he was in the car writing code on the fly to make it work — and the video still required editing.
To save money, the film adds, Tesla used cameras instead of the advanced lidar sensors to guide the autopilot. The film then presents gut-wrenching footage of fatal crashes, which it alleges were caused by autopilot.
So far, faulty autopilot has allegedly caused more than 60 deaths. Details of most cases are not known, as Tesla settled with most of the victims’ families.
His shift to the right
Throughout the movie, we watch as Musk reverses previously held positions when it can benefit him, such as his flip from stark AI skeptic who believes it will exterminate humanity (if it doesn’t keep us around as pets) to one of the loudest pro-AI voices out there who has integrated his chatbot Grok into the U.S. military.
For most of his time on the public stage, Musk was nonpolitical. In one clip, he says he’s socially liberal and economically in the center. Then came the pandemic.
“Covid is when some switch got flipped in his brain,” says neuroscientist and podcaster Sam Harris, who was close with Musk until they fell out after Musk began tweeting that “the coronavirus panic is dumb.”
Musk became one of the loudest critics of lockdown, reopening a Tesla factory in Alameda County despite its lockdown rules. Roughly 450 cases of covid-19 were subsequently reported.
Meanwhile, the government opened several investigations into Musk and his companies. The documentary argues this was the real reason behind his embrace of Trump: to shut those down.
“If Kamala Harris wins, his goose is cooked,” Swisher says. “His only choice was helping Trump and Trump would leave him alone.”
Or, as Tucker Carlson told him before the election: “If he loses, man, you’re f—ed, dude.”
“If he loses, I’m f—ed,” Musk responds.
There is so much more
This barely scrapes the surface of “Musk,” a triumphant work of documentary that seeks to answer a question St. Clair poses: “What is Elon actually building? What are his goals?”
There’s Twitter/X. There’s SpaceX. There’s DOGE. There’s destruction of the United States Agency for International Development and the global fallout. There’s lawsuits claiming Grok is used to create child porn. There’s Starlink. There’s the way it’s all interconnected.
Gibney doesn’t end with a conclusion, instead allowing the audience to decide for themselves what to make of this almost mythical figure.
For her part, though, St. Clair has decided:
“Elon is a nuke.”
The post ‘Musk’ film is almost four hours long, engrossing and terrifying. What to know. appeared first on Washington Post.
