Alex Gibney opens his documentary about the tech titan Elon Musk with a question: “How could Musk assume so much power, and why had we given it to him?”
The Oscar-winning filmmaker, whose previous subjects include Enron and Scientology, spends nearly four hours answering that question in “Musk,” tracing the rise of the Tesla chairman and chief executive from his childhood in South Africa to the I.P.O. of SpaceX in June, which made Musk the world’s first trillionaire. (The movie, in theaters, has a 10-minute intermission baked in.)
When news of Gibney’s project broke back in 2023, Musk took to Twitter (now X) to preemptively call it a “hit piece.” Combining interviews with ex-wives and former colleagues and clips from Musk’s 30-plus years in the spotlight with commentary from an A.I. version of Musk constructed from an archive of his own words, the film follows his rise from Silicon Valley start-ups to his brief tenure as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Here are some takeaways.
Musk’s privileged childhood was marred by violence
“Musk” paints a harrowing portrait of Elon’s youth in apartheid-era South Africa. In one interview, his wealthy businessman father, Errol Musk, claims to have shot and killed three intruders, covering the floor of their home in a “swimming pool” of blood. In another, he describes Elon riding in a car alongside the body of a family friend who had just “dropped dead.” After Elon’s mother, Maye Musk, separated from Errol, claiming physical and mental abuse (charges her former husband has denied), Elon continued to live with his father. When Elon was bullied so badly at school that he was hospitalized for a week, his father, he later said, sided with his attackers.
He’s made a habit of failing upward
Gibney suggests that Elon Musk’s business blunders have been as lucrative as his successes. After a failed bid to become the chief executive of his first start-up, Zip2, Musk was pushed out of the company but earned a $22 million buyout. Only a few years later, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel pushed Musk out of PayPal with a $250 million parting gift.
More recently, according to Gibney, Twitter (now X) lost 80 percent of its value after Musk purchased it (though other estimates vary). Musk then rolled X and his A.I. start-up xAI into SpaceX for the largest I.P.O. on record to date, prompting Gibney to ask, “How can you keep screwing up and still make millions?”
Tesla is a lesson in entrepreneurial sleight of hand
While Musk claims to be a founder of Tesla, the automotive company was actually started by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. However, Musk negotiated the title of co-founder for himself as part of a 2009 legal settlement. Later, he claimed that Tesla drivers could easily swap out their 1,000-pound car batteries, which helped him garner more than $100 million worth of environmental credits from the state of California, though he had only built a single battery swap facility in the desert.
Gibney also dedicates substantial time to Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot feature, which has been linked to deaths and injuries. In 2016, Musk oversaw the creation of a promotional video depicting a self-driving Tesla, causing the company’s stock to rise. However, it was later revealed that humans had controlled the car at certain points during filming and that the car had actually crashed.
He sees increasing the birthrate as a “national emergency”
“Musk” includes extended interviews with Justine Musk, Elon’s first wife, and Ashley St. Clair, a former conservative influencer who dated Elon from 2023 to 2025 and gave birth to one of his 14 known children. St. Clair claims to have received messages from multiple women on social media whom Musk offered to impregnate. “It’s like a Gatling gun of sperm in his DMs,” she says in one of the documentary’s more evocative lines.
Despite Musk’s preoccupation with procreating, both women suggest that Musk sustains little interest in his children or their mothers. Justine remembers Elon telling her, “I am the alpha in this relationship” at their wedding reception, and later telling her, “If you were my employee, I’d fire you.” St. Clair claims Musk openly called X Æ A-Xii (whose mother is Musk’s former partner Claire Boucher, the musician known as Grimes) his favorite and didn’t care to spend time with his other offspring.
Starlink and DOGE gave him global reach
According to Gibney, Musk has been able to consolidate political power via Starlink, the satellite arm of SpaceX, which provides internet access from space. While Musk supplied Ukrainian forces with necessary tech during their war with Russia, he’s also able to control and withhold access to it. That military bargaining chip has given Musk remarkable leverage in lucrative business deals around the world.
As part of his work with DOGE, Musk dispatched gatekeepers and regulations designed to check the A.I. industry. With those barriers removed, Gibney speculates that Musk could use A.I. to amass even more power.
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