There’s an inevitability about the arrival of Musk, Alex Gibney’s absorbing, if a little one-sided, four-hour documentary about the world’s richest man. America’s foremost documentarian, the 72-year-old Gibney has been building up to someone like Elon Musk in a career that’s seen him tackle other outliers, from Julian Assange (2013’s We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks) to Steve Jobs (2015’s Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine). Now, in the wake of Musk’s increasing wealth and influence, Gibney dives right in.
Receiving its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Musk starts with shots of the cosmos. It’s a reminder that he’s the tycoon who tried to reach for the stars, quite literally; the pioneer who built rockets with his SpaceX company and dreamt of sending people to Mars, a "multi-planetary experience" looking to a future beyond Earth; the kid from Pretoria, South Africa, who read sci-fi comics with great intensity and grew up to style himself as a real-life Tony Stark (and, yes, he even has a cameo in Iron Man 2).
Without direct access to his subject, Gibney reveals that he got his team to compile a database of everything Musk has ever said in public; these soundbites are used, at points – spoken by a sort of CG-created Musk, sitting in a chair. It’s a weird notion that doesn’t quite work (why not just use the audio over images?) but it's a rare misstep in a rigorous film that guides us from Musk’s early days at Zip2, his first company which he later sold for $22 million, through to his controversy-laden time heading up DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) for 'Trump 2.0'.
View oEmbed on the source websiteAt first Musk seems like an innovator, or 'The Chief Engineer' as he calls himself, a visionary even. But it doesn’t take long for Gibney to lift the rock and see the underside. How Musk re-wrote the narrative when it came to Tesla Motors, for example. The evolutionary electric car company became Musk’s baby at the same time as SpaceX, but only after he’d engineered co-founder Martin Eberhard, "the worst guy I’ve ever worked with", out of the boardroom.
Gibney craftily shows how good Musk is at raising money from the US government, selling a dream for all to buy into. There is a dark side to the man (and not just because he later sports a baseball cap reading ‘Dark MAGA’) that Gibney highlights. But is there anything here that’s new, any revelations? Arguably not, but the filmmaker paints a formidable portrait, showing just what it took Musk to become the wealthiest capitalist on the planet. The richer he got, the more his ethics "completely unravelled", argues one interviewee, author Sam Harris.
While Gibney doesn’t really reach out to many (any?) subscribers to "the cult of Elon", it’s far from a hatchet job. There’s plenty on Musk’s eerie personal life, including direct access to his first ex-spouse Justine, who labelled herself "the starter wife". Frustratingly, Gibney skips over his subsequent marriages (yes, they divorced, remarried, divorced again) to British actress Talulah Riley, although he does include the fact she encouraged Musk to buy Twitter "and delete it" (in the end, he paid $44 billion, renamed it ‘X’ and let the likes of Andrew Tate back on it, all in the name of freedom of speech).
His endless army of children, fathered through partners, surrogates and ‘baby mamas’, is also reported on, while Gibney delves into Musk’s eccentricities, including his reported drug use (LSD, ketamine and more). Amid all the craziness, it’s suggested that Musk is seeking "moral absolution" for his actions, though quite how he might achieve that, especially in relation to alleged fatalities involving self-driving Tesla cars remains to be seen. Ultimately, Musk shows what happens when one man, with a titanic messiah complex and endless money, gets insanely drunk on his own self-worth.
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