Always glad to see Elon Musk pummeled, of course, as he is in Alex Gibney’s documentary , now playing in theaters. The film sounds the alarm over this right-wing trillionaire tech bastard, which can’t be done too early or too often. But there’s a problem when even I, a fervent, long-term Musk hater, get exhausted, then irritated, then fed up by this film long before its grueling four-hour running time is over.Musk
For me, the burning question quickly became: Who is this film for? What’s the intended audience for this thing?
Gibney’s huge, heavy-handed disemboweling of Musk, clumsily wielding an axe rather than a scalpel, was immediately identified as “a hit piece that misses, and makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours” by , warning off his obsessed fans, who’ll obviously be skipping the film. It’s an indication of Musk’s essential stupidity — his cluelessness about everything except how to generate profits, particularly off his own repeated business failures — that he keeps obsessively commenting on this film on social media, thus doing its publicity work for the PR team presumably getting paid to do the same job. Some curiosity-seekers with time to kill might head to the multiplex, thanks to the many free, self-defeating, Elon Musk–generated promo tweets.Musk himself
The obvious audience for the film would seem to be the many who despise Musk. That’s a vast number of sane people: political leftists; the legions screwed over by him in business deals or working for him in thankless, underpaid jobs; those fired by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and those infuriated by the firings; the hapless car enthusiasts suckered into driving malfunctioning Teslas; and anyone who keeps up at all with Musk’s role in the latest sinister predations of the high-tech industry in league with right-wing governments around the world.
But consider that these are the people in the know, already aware of Musk’s harrowing South African childhood, early business failures that nevertheless made him huge profits, insidious credit-stealing takeover of the Tesla car company, SpaceX ventures, self-driving car and Twitter/X and DOGE debacles, appalling personal life, including the fathering of at least fourteen children by many different women in order to spread Musk seed around the world, and all the rest of it. These potential spectators are perhaps the least likely to feel the need to torture themselves with even more intimate knowledge of a man famous for the widespread repugnance inspired by his ideas, his rhetoric, his practices, and his bizarre physical self-presentation.
I personally feel I deserve a medal for having sat through . Or at least a care package full of soothing home-spa products from a concerned citizens group.Musk
Who Is This Four-Hour Takedown For?
That leaves, as potential audience members, those who don’t know much about Elon Musk or are totally indifferent to him. And obviously those lucky, oblivious citizens aren’t going to create a rush of ticket-buying either.
Oh, and one other tiny group of possible -watchers includes cinephiles who are always interested in what’s being done in the documentary form. They’re all flocking to see the documentary that opened last week, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s , a total wow of a film that’s drawing in crowds far beyond the size of the usual audience for documentaries. It took in about $15 million its first weekend; made about $315,000 on more than four hundred screens.MuskYou Can See EverythingMuskother
But if some of those spectators go above and beyond the call of cinephile duty and watch too, they’ll be depressed at best, and appalled at worst. It’s a sloppy job, , reflecting a juvenile sensibility. It’s constantly presenting slapdash footage and recorded voices that aren’t identified or attributed to any source, and it’s loaded with what I guess must be Alex Gibney’s idea of infotainment stylings intended to make documentaries popular with the masses. Because Musk wouldn’t sit for an interview, for example, Gibney mined his interviews with other filmmakers and journalists and podcasters to digitally generate an AI avatar of Elon Musk who speaks as he might speak if he could be persuaded to speak to the filmmaker.MuskMusk
This is clearly Gibney’s idea of a big “gotcha” triumph, cleverly turning Musk’s massive AI investment against him. But really all it accomplishes is more misery for the half-dozen spectators in the theater, getting forcibly returned over and over to the bizarrely big-headed Musk avatar, made unaccountably handsomer than the actual golem-like real-life Musk, tricked out in leathers and enthroned in a gaming chair to deliver further inane commentary, such as musings on the possibility that we’re living in a simulation or that humans might turn out to be nothing more than “the biological bootloader” for digital superintelligence.
The Gamer StylePew-Pew-Pew
In general, Alex Gibney seems to have made an attempt at form-follows-function in creating a documentary that’s extremely Musk-like, resulting in an overall sense of slovenly gigantism that’s nevertheless unimpressive: a film as crude, outsize, erratic, and shambling as the man himself. For example, Gibney resorts to endless comic book and video game effects, favorite Musk pastimes, in order to present Musk’s rampage through the world. The first time we see a lengthy sequence involving first-person-shooter-style animation to represent Musk’s takeover of Twitter, blasting thousands of employees who actually know how the business runs, mass firings that help Musk turn a sometimes profitable company into a free-falling flop called X, it’s barely endurable. But then we have to watch the same extensive gamer massacres a second time, now with Musk’s notorious chainsaw repurposed as a firing weapon, to represent DOGE’s rampage through various US government buildings. It stands for the firing of legions of highly competent officials early in Donald Trump’s second term, before Musk had a spat with Trump and DOGE was shut down. By this point, it’s merely infuriating on too many levels to count.pew-pew-pew
Doomerism in Place of Politics
The message of , just to save you the trouble of actually sitting through the film, especially if you’re a leftist thinking that you to go see it, is that it’s hopeless to resist Elon Musk’s fascist takeover. It’s already too late. Musk has amassed so much wealth, accrued so much political influence among the worst of the worst of global leaders, and created such extensive surveillance systems worldwide, the only thing to do is wait for him to officially declare himself as a comic-book supervillain come to life, having finally achieved world dominance, and probably called something stupid like GreatX, Overlord of the Galaxy.Muskreally ought
And the attitude Gibney adopts — gloating over our guaranteed collective doom — serves the lunatic right, the fascist Musk-lovers of the world, very well. Why bother organizing when we’re all going to die?
starts and ends with the sublime imagery of outer space, which is promptly despoiled by Elon Musk and his imagined colonization of all of it (“I want to die on Mars,” he once mused), which began with SpaceX, represented in as his most successful company in spite of all those crashing rockets. If the film succeeds in its mission to induce widespread cynical despair, you’ll be thinking the human race needs to end if only to prevent Musk from getting his big dumb mitts on other planets after he destroys the earth.MuskMusk
This article originally appeared in , a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. JacobinSubscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.