Inside Alex Gibney's Explosive, Four-Hour Elon Musk Documentary

Back in 2023, when it was announced that Alex Gibney was working on a film about Elon Musk, his subject quickly dismissed it as “a hit piece” on X. Later that year, he tweeted “Gibney is a douche.” Gibney, in jest, fired back: “Douché.” That interaction opens the film, setting the tone for the prolific documentarian’s Musk, a nearly four-hour examination of the billionaire and magnate behind Tesla, SpaceX and DOGE. After intense work on the project, Gibney had almost completed a normal-length film—but then 2024, and Musk’s enormous financial backing of Trump happened. And DOGE happened. And the alleged Nazi salute at an event following the second Trump inauguration happened. So the film grew and grew.

Despite its length, Gibney’s film is surprisingly compelling. Based on mountains of research into Musk’s life and career, it features in-depth interviews with many people who have been close to him over the years, including his ex-wife Justine Musk; the social media influencer Ashley St. Clair, with whom Elon has a son; and his father, Errol Musk. The documentary is a deeply unflattering portrait of one of the world’s most consequential actors. Among other claims, it alleges that Tesla has fudged key data on its cars, like battery mileage, and exaggerated the capabilities of their full self-driving mode with potentially deadly results, allegations the company has disputed.

Despite his railing against government spending and inefficiency, the documentary argues Musk has himself benefited tremendously from government investment, often through a process Gibney likens to “reward hacking,” a term from the AI space describing artificial intelligence agents’ tendency to find loopholes in their prompts that deliver results that score well but don’t actually achieve the user’s intended goal. And on the personal side, there are also Musk’s many children, had with many women, some of whom involved contractual arrangements with NDAs, attested to by St. Clair. Later in the doc, Gibney details the alleged harmful effects of Musk and DOGE administering the Trump administration’s massive cuts to USAID, which has reportedly led to severe deprivation and deaths among impoverished communities around the world. In June, Musk posted on X that nobody can “cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!” And all that is before getting into Musk’s embrace of ultra-national right-wing movements around the world.

Not having access to Musk himself, Gibney and his team opted for a technological workaround, gathering as much audio as they could find of Musk talking, and then creating an extremely uncanny animated avatar of him to speak directly to the audience. It’s a bold choice, and one that Gibney uses to great effect, alongside sequences with video game-style graphics, to plunge the audience into a reality inspired by Musk’s musings about the possibility that our world is a simulation. The end result is an entertaining, often very funny, but ultimately extremely disturbing study of the corrupting influence of money and power in American society and politics.

Before the movie’s North American premiere, Gibney spoke to GQ about the film, and what we’re really talking about when we talk about Elon.

GQ: I think it’s easy to look at Musk from one angle and see an embodiment of the Great Man Theory—the idea that one unique individual with certain qualities can have a profound historical impact. How do you feel about that idea?

Alex Gibney: Well, I don't discount the great man theory of history. Powerful individuals can have enormous impact. Stalin, Mao; people who are on the “good side,” FDR, you know, but they also exist within a realm of social forces that is ineluctable. So Musk comes at a time when the world is most vulnerable to his worst excesses, is what I would say.

That leads me to my next though, which is that the documentary is a big profile of Musk, but it feels a little bit like a profile of us.

I think that's true. It's a profile of us and what we've allowed to happen. I kind of asked that question right up at the top. How did he accrue so much power, and how did we let him get it? And so it is a portrait of us, in a way. And some of the systems we've taken for granted that are ripe for manipulation. At the same time, you also have to acknowledge some of the intriguing things about Musk—and the reason I think that the film has its breadth and its length and that it's important—is you need to understand his rise as well as where he's gone recently.

I would count myself as one of those who was very impressed by him. You know, in the face of the Big Three, he's building a car company full of electric cars. I was a fan, to be honest with you. I say in the film—I had Tesla solar panels, and I had a Tesla Powerwall. I thought that was a much better solution than having a gas-burning generator in case the power went out. He kind of reminded me, in a way, of early Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs really got his schtick down. I think he got a better schtick down than Musk did, but I was impressed by him, and he seemed to have a noble cause.

But a lot of the characters I follow are afflicted by what some cops call “noble cause corruption.” Over time they believe that the ends justifies the means, and therefore you should be able to cut any corner in order to be able to get to where you need to go to pursue your noble cause.

That also seems connected to the idea that, for Musk, it’s almost like the world doesn't exist as such. The film gets into his theory that the world might operate like a simulation.

That, I think, comes later to be honest. I think the other thing I should say on the upside is one of the things that a sense of mission gets him is a powerful recruiting tool for very capable engineers at both Tesla and SpaceX. Because we're all so used to saying, “Elon did this and Elon did that.” There are thousands of people at these companies, and they're really talented people, but nobody talks about them, and the reason they're there is because of the original sense of mission. A lot of guys wanted to go to Mars and thought NASA was bureaucratic and bloated and they could do better. And people at Tesla were like, "Yeah, let's build an electric car. How cool is that?”

Musk has benefitted a lot over his career from securing government contracts, subsidies, and loans to the tune of $38 billion, according to the Washington Post. The film heavily implies that it’s the American public who’ve been helping keep him afloat, often at crucial moments for his companies.

And you can argue about whether that's good or bad. I happen to believe that the role of the government steering private enterprise in a socially useful direction is good. Some of the libertarians I interviewed in the film thought it was terrible, that he was just conning the public. But you can see what a genius he also was at reward hacking, that phrase that Cory Doctorow uses. His fortune is built on the backs of American taxpayers.

The film suggests quite strongly that the public is subsidizing his ability to build this fortune, but that they aren’t necessarily getting much in return.

You could argue that for a while they were getting something in return. They were getting an electric car company. You also have to ask—and it was the question a lot of us were asking during COVID, too, with the Moderna vaccine, which, after all, had been supported by U.S. taxpayer dollars to some extent—if Tesla does really well, what does the public get back?

Right—should the public not have a stake?

Why does Musk get all the reward? What if it's just a rigged insider's game, so that a bunch of people in Northern California can walk off with all our cash?

In the documentary, I got the sense that Musk is disinterested in the idea of a “public,” of the collective society. That there are people he’s affecting, like the hundreds of workers who reportedly tested positive for COVID-19 after he reopened Tesla’s Freemont, California factory in defiance of county orders.

It was interesting—in some of the early footage, you see him very generously praise the employees at SpaceX. And he also chants “America, fuck yeah!” He's kind of rah-rah about it in a way that you think is warranted. But the longer it goes, the further it goes. The more his fortunes rise, the more it's like he's the Techno King. He's the monarch. He's the god. Everybody else is immaterial. When it comes to COVID, he doesn't give a shit about the workers. It's just like, “Let's get back online so I can make more money.”

But he also has a sense of mission about it.

There's a sense of mission, yeah. But you know, there is a sense of mission, which is keeping your workers safe. What is a company? A company is not just there to goose valuation for the shareholders. It's also there for the customers, and it's also there for the employees.

This is where the public comes in, no? We’re allowing this to a large degree, and telling ourselves a story about it.

We tell ourselves a story that rich people are great because they're a sign of success and a marker of success, and also we should never encroach or impinge on rich people because they're such geniuses that they're going to take us to the promised land. You know, hands off.

But it's also what we get out of it. We get a cool Tesla car with nice screens in it, and it makes us feel like we're living in luxury, living in the future.

Yeah, I might phrase it slightly differently. Instead of spending your money electing politicians who could really take a principled stand against global warming, you buy a luxury car and believe you're saving the planet.

In the process of researching the film, collecting all of Musk’s quotes, and the deep investigation that you and your team did, how attentive were you to finding the balance in communicating what often feel like contradictory ideas about public complicity and Musk’s responsibility?

Let me put it this way: Having done a film about Steve Jobs, who I now regard—I mean, that film was critical of Steve Jobs, and now, compared to Elon, I see Steve Jobs as almost—I wouldn't go so far as to say “a saintly character,” but much more principled character.

Well, that's how some people these days talk about George W. Bush, right? But I remember the 2000s. I remember your films.

That’s right. But the one thing that's interesting about Jobs from a psychological perspective is that after the disaster of NeXT, when he came back to Apple—Apple 2.0—he surrounded himself with a small group of people who would and could tell him “No.” He had the wisdom to understand that you need to get a sense of perspective, and that's what allowed him to take Apple to the next level. With Musk, it was just the opposite of that. The more power he accrued, the more he surrounded himself with “yes” men, just like Trump.

The parallel I was going to draw with the Jobs film was that I started out that film thinking about when Steve Jobs died. I can understand why his family would weep, of course. But why did so many members of the public start crying? What was it about him that touched the public in such a way? He was a businessman, right? I think to some extent, a lot of the issues with Apple were also our issues. We loved our iPhones so much. “Please don't tell me about the way you abuse workers in China, or the way you pollute in China, because this is a beautiful product.” That's a problem.

But take the Obama administration. Again, without making it explicit, you basically make the case that we have the Obama administration to thank for—

For his success, absolutely. The answer to that is “yes,” and I put the Obama stuff in there on purpose to show how Musk would go Democrat when it suited him, and then go Republican when it suited him, but also to show that yeah, we have the Obama administration to thank for Tesla and SpaceX's success. On the other hand, you could say with some validity that the efficiencies that Musk delivered at SpaceX, or that SpaceX delivered, were impressive. Suddenly we didn't have to spend so much money on bloated NASA or cost-plus contracts for McDonnell Douglas. We were getting results in a better way. But nobody was minding the store. What problem would come up later if suddenly you have a private individual who's essentially running a public space program? That's a problem.

It was funny, for me, hearing from Lori Garver, the former NASA Deputy Administrator under Obama, who talked about opening things up to the private sector and how it was finally time to do that. I was thinking to myself, “Was it? Could NASA not have been reformed to be made more efficient?"

That's the question.

I think there's an idea that a lot of people have, including among the public, that the private sector is me. “I’m a private individual.” But when something's public, presumably we all own it, or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work in the American context.

There is a con that happens, which is [the idea] that private companies are good and efficient, whereas the government is always bloated and inefficient and only exists for corrupt reasons. And that was the ideology that [Musk] used when he used DOGE to take a chainsaw to the American government. That was juxtaposed with those very idealistic and capable young women who worked for the U.S. Digital Service, that became [a part of] DOGE.

You show in the film, particularly with the IRS, how the government might have saved some money in “efficiency” by firing workers, but now those workers don't have jobs, and you've blown up the deficit massively. And of course, part of why you've contributed to the deficit is that you're now allowing a lot of potential tax avoidance because there aren’t enough agents or resources to go after wealthy people and corporations and their teams of accountants and lawyers.

Correct, and furthermore, you're the biggest one who's allowed to get away with murder. Because all those investigations into you? Gone. Including a criminal investigation. [In 2022, the DOJ reportedly opened a criminal investigation into Tesla for potential fraud surrounding claims about its vehicles’ Autopilot self-driving capabilities. There were further reports of the probe being ongoing in 2024. Charges have not been issued and the status of the investigation is unclear.]

Even stretching back to the Obama administration, you argue that Musk was doing stuff with Tesla at the time that probably warranted closer scrutiny by the government.

100 percent. And actually, there was an ongoing DOJ investigation into fraud relating to Tesla Autopilot [under the Biden administration]. But I would argue, as many of the journalists on the Musk beat would argue, that they let him get away with murder, both on the SpaceX side and also on the Tesla side, in terms of worker protections.

Does that reflect a failure of imagination in liberal politics?

Well, I think it's also part of the American political system, unfortunately, which is a pay-to-play system. Our system is so dominated by money ever since Citizens United. It's been a kind of crushing blow. That's been the problem with the Democratic Party. You have a party that tries to be Republican lite, because they have to court all these billionaires in order to be able to pay for their elections.

When you look at the Biden administration, they were obviously investigating him and his companies a lot, including the criminal probe into Tesla, and discrimination suits against both Tesla and SpaceX, the latter of which was dropped by Trump’s DOJ in 2025. Do you see mistakes in how those investigations were handled?

I think like many investigations in the Biden administration, they probably went too slow. Now, I was never able to get the investigators to talk to me, the people who were heading.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, because they were playing it by the book. “It's an ongoing investigation. We're not talking to you.” They went slow, but they were investigating. There were—I can't remember the number now, but I listed it in the film— a tremendous number of federal investigations, civil investigations into many of Musk’s companies. Worker abuses and all this other stuff, and at least one criminal investigation.

Does the fact that those cases were largely dropped or settled with fines or paid penalties speak to systems, both social structures and government structures, and a potential lack of accountability?

100 percent.

The systems are in place, in theory, to produce accountability. But they don't seem to be working that way.

And also, one of the things is this transactional form of politics that we've developed has now resulted in total unaccountability. In other words, you can buy [favor with] a president who then controls, without any sense of norms, a Department of Justice and an FBI that only goes after its enemies and always protects its friends. It's like a mafia organization. So, yeah, there's no accountability in that system. You get what you pay for.

But I feel like that also reverses itself in a way, where it produces a lack of trust generally. So when the Biden administration is investigating Musk or Trump, a lot of people buy into the idea that that is also a political persecution.

Well, and that's a con. That started with, “The election was rigged,” January 6th. You start to denigrate everything. You start to try to undermine the world of facts and reality, and that's an old authoritarian con. I should point out, one of the reasons I put that old movie in, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, is to say, “We've been here before, and you should recognize this for what it is.”

Isn't that always how it is, though?

I kind of think it is, but people are presenting Musk as if he's something brand new. I don't think it's so brand new. And we're seeing now the result of a long slide toward authoritarian rule in the United States. Because you can go back and see the transgressions in the Nixon administration, the Reagan administration. And then the Bush administration keeps moving further and further and further, and then finally, Trump takes advantage of it.

Speaking from a Canadian perspective, watching the election in 2000 and then the Iraq War, it felt at the time like the culmination of a breakdown.

We didn’t know that it was just a prelude to something much worse. Though, in a way, the body count there was much higher.

But Democrats have been complicit in wars, too, and in big money politics.

Correct, they have. The Democrats have been complicit in the system of money politics. The one thing I would say in favor of Democrats is they're always left holding the bag because the Republicans play this game of, “There's nothing worse than a big deficit,” and then every Republican administration runs up a massive deficit. And then, when Democrats get in and want to put in some social programs, it's like, “We can't do it—we've got a big deficit.” Now Trump has done this on steroids. Allegedly, Musk was so concerned about the deficit, and he exploded it.

But again, that speaks to this breakdown in trust, and a lack of vision. It comes through in the documentary, that in that gap you can have a person like Elon Musk come in and say, "Well, I have a vision of the future.”

Right. Well, the future is very convenient because it doesn't have to be real.

Yeah, but it is something that we all are working towards, right? So we need some story to tell about it.

We do, but it's such a distant future that it's just fantastical.

In his case.

Yeah, in his case.

Going to Mars, and all that stuff.

I mean, we have children, right? We want to imagine a good future for them. And so, in that sense, we're all invested in the future. But we all know that we have to work for it in the present. Somehow, Trump and Musk have managed to say, “Actually, we can destroy the present, and then there'll be a spaceship waiting for us to take us to a beautiful future on Mars.” That's the imagery at the end of the film.

For me, it contrasts with the era of the post-WWII liberal consensus. Obviously that period had its own issues, but there was a relative consensus about investing in the public, and the role of the government and the public in interacting with and steering private industry, and in building institutions, building programs, supporting social safety nets, that kind of thing. That also coincides with the last time that you had major world expos where people were having real visions of the future that didn't feel corrupted in this way.

That's right. Though, I think if you go back, you'll see some of those… This is the World of Tomorrow and stuff like that.

Sure, of course, it’s all rose-colored glasses. But I don't think that was nothing. That was also the height of unions.

That's right, that's right.

Which seems to be everything that Elon Musk is against.

It's all a balance, right? How do you balance private interests with public good? It's a continuum. Where are you on the scale at any moment in time? It's a constant struggle. I'll pick up your argument and suggest that the rise of Musk shows that there's a guy who is appealing to our idealism, in order to gain tremendous wealth and power, which he then used to crush every bit of that idealism.

Why do you think it's harder to sell people on something like building libraries and giving people healthcare than it is to say, “The world might end, so we should give money to a private company to build rockets that can one day take us to Mars”?

I think it’s because people don't necessarily see a direct connection. There has been a sort of cult of the entrepreneur, and over the years there has been this denigration of public systems. And sometimes public systems are deeply inefficient.

But so are corporate systems.

They are. That's the part that people don't get. It's like, have you tried a helpline recently?

Yeah, right.

And so that's exactly true. In private enterprise, you're supposed to pursue admirable profits, which means that you inevitably engage in enshittification, to use another Cory Doctorow phrase. You're cheapening the product and making things worse for your employees so you can get an admirable profit. That's not exactly the invisible hand.

You don't investigate it in the film too deeply, but Musk's dalliances with the racist far-right, his AI bot Grok calling itself MechaHitler, promoting the film Citizen Vigilante. You put it in obliquely in some places.

I put it in a couple of places. Once he takes over X, you see a number of his unhinged tweets, and to me, they're just outrageous. And I didn't need to say anything about them. And then later on, you can see him promoting Tommy Robinson.

Right.

The reason I ask is, you dive into a lot of interesting threads in the film, and that keeps coming up. I was wondering if there was any thought towards delving into that aspect in a fuller way.

I felt that it was there. We tease it, and you can draw your own conclusions about it.

It's also the community that he’s cultivated on X.

Well, yeah, that's true. Honestly, I think the tweets indicate where his preferences go, without getting into it too much. I wanted, to some extent, to let Musk say it for himself, and that was the avatar.

On the subject of the avatar. First of all, how did you do it? Was that AI?

Some.

Okay.

Once we decided to do it, we put together a database of a tremendous amount of Elon material, whether it be podcasts, documentaries, TV interviews, et cetera. We wanted his voice in the film. Everything that's in the film in his voice is his voice, and it's chosen by us. It's not chosen by AI.

What about the visuals?

So, we work with a design firm that I’ve worked with before called MakeMake. And we designed his sort of lair. We designed his clothes. We designed his chair. And we came up with a period and look for his face that we felt stood for where we were. And I think it's reasonably flattering to him, too. Once we did that, we needed to find a way to animate it, to have the voice be in sync. And with that we engaged with AI and an AI artist at MakeMake to animate the face so that it looks like a kind of uncanny valley face.

It felt like fair play, to turn that around on him.

I agree. I just felt it was investing in the themes and ideas of him and the movie. It was kind of playing in his playground.

I understand the conceit of it, but did you worry about the—

The fact that we used AI?

Well, maybe that, but also just the idea of having this avatar of him and kind of engaging in that unreality.

Well, I felt it was actually part of the movie. In other words, he's engaging in unreality all the time. So reminding us of this weird tension between reality and unreality didn't seem like a bad thing. It kind of invested in that need to be critical thinking about that all the time. So I felt, in that way, it was fair. It was intentional to engage in this tension. And in terms of the AI, I feel that it was ethical AI, in the sense that it was a tool used by human hands with intention.

But it also reflects, I think, what to me is a real danger that the film expresses, about this guy who likes to muse about reality being a simulation, and is then forcing us all to live in that unreality.

That's right. We're living in Elon's world, and there were other things I did in terms of the interview backgrounds, which were all designed.

I was going to ask about that too, because I couldn't tell. Were those real locations?

No. Only one was a real location, which was the location of one of the more unreal characters: Errol Musk. But all of them contain little bits of the pink and blue lighting features of cyberpunk. As if to say, we're all living in Elon's world.

You spend a lot of time focusing on some of the women in Musk’s life. What did you discover in your interviews with them about his relationship with women?

Well, one of the things I found interesting, many of the women in his life—I can't say “all” because I haven't talked to all of them, that would be a Herculean task—think back with some nostalgia and sadness to the courting period, where he was very charming and very engaging. And then once they had his children, he turned, or once they were married.

Some tech barons, after their success, get engaged to or suddenly start running around with women who are beautiful but not particularly dynamic. With Musk, all the women are pretty interesting women, right? Whether it be Justine, who’s a fascinating woman, Grimes, Ashley [St. Clair]. And by all accounts, Shivon Zilis is very interesting. But then there seems to be a kind of deep-seated misogyny.

It also, I think, feels like he just views people and institutions in a very instrumental way.

Right.

He's interested in interesting women, but they become instrumental.

And it may be as creepy as he's interested in interesting women because he likes their gene pool for the progeny that they will produce.

I don’t want to speculate about that, but I’m referring to the way that he's treating human beings generally.

Correct. It seems that from what both Justine and indeed Elon Musk's mother say, he didn't have a good role model in terms of a man treating his wife with respect. [Maye Musk has accused ex-husband Errol of physical abuse during their marriage. Errol Musk has denied the allegations.] That doesn't get him off the hook.

But people come from somewhere.

That's right.

I forget now who says it, but somebody says, “Look at his father....”

Justine.

Right. How was that interview with Justine?

She's a really impressive woman, and a very smart and interesting writer of sci-fi horror fiction. A really good writer. Her blog was great. I wish I could have included more of it. And that [Marie Claire] article she wrote about the starter wife. It's a really good piece.

What was it like interviewing his dad?

Weird.

Yeah?

It was one of those things where we just called him up and he said, "Sure, I'll sit for an interview.” And it was right after the big New York Times article came out about [Errol Musk’s alleged] abuse. I asked him about it, but I really didn't go into it much, because it had to do with this other family. [In 2025, the New York Times reported on multiple allegations against Errol Musk of child sexual abuse involving five of his children and stepchildren, dating as far back as 1993. Errol denied the allegations, calling them “false and nonsense in the extreme.”]

There is always the question with documentaries like this: how much are you preaching to the choir? Personally, I learned things about Musk from the film that I didn’t know, but I’m also already convinced about him anyway. Do you ever feel a sense of impotence in making work like this? Do you worry about it?

I don't worry about it in the sense that I hope that as many people will come to this as possible. And I have made films in the past where you could say I was preaching to the choir, but ended up being moving to people. I'll give you one example. I made a film called Taxi to the Dark Side, and it ended up being taught at West Point and the Army JAG School.

Do you think Pete Hegseth is still showing it?

No. And nor would Pete Hegseth be somebody who's going to rush out to see Musk. I do think [Joe] Rogan is kind of turning in an interesting direction now. He sees the [Trump administration’s] abuses of power. And so I hope that some of the Elon folks come out.

I remember it was instructive to me when I did the film on Scientology, Going Clear. It ended up having a very big impact on people both inside and people who had just left but were too afraid to say that they had left. And by investing in the rise and fall story, it helped people engage with their own journey in terms of being a believer, cleaving to that belief, and then suddenly allowing themselves to think, maybe the prophet has been deceiving you.

I guess that's the power of journalism.

You hope!

MeToo was that.

Yeah, you hope. You make it, and you hope that people come. Let me just say this. I'll leave it to Elon, as a free speech absolutist, to encourage all of his followers to see the film so they can decide for themselves.

Well, “Douché.”

[Laughs] Right. Yes. Exactly.