Alex Gibney’s new documentary about Elon Musk—simply titled “Musk”—has a lot of ground to cover. Musk, after all, has had a busy few years, from his Twitter acquisition to his work at DOGE to his day-to-day leadership at many different tech ventures, including Tesla, Neuralink and the newly-public SpaceX.
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that the latest film from the director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief clocks in at just under four hours. Even at that length, there’s sure to be plenty that didn’t make the final cut.
One theme that Gibney doesn’t leave unexplored? Musk’s self-conscious myth-making as an entrepreneur and industry leader. The multi-hyphenate mogul is, after all, as much a public figure as he is a businessman, and has gone to great lengths to shape his public perception.
In the latest episode of Slate’s tech and business podcast “What Next: TBD,” host Lizzie O’Leary spoke with Gibney about what she calls the “myth of self” that serves as a throughline in the new documentary.
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“Virtually every CEO is a credit-grabber,” Gibney says, but Musk “went one step or two or three or five steps further than that when he had a big disagreement with Martin Eberhard and fired him.”
Eberhard is one of the original cofounders of Tesla, alongside Marc Tarpenning; the two launched the electric vehicle company in 2003, with Musk, an investor, soon becoming chairman of the board. But by 2007, Eberhard was out—the details of his departure are murky, but may have had to do with accusations of impeding vehicle production or misleading investors—and a year later, Musk was the CEO himself.
Relations between the two have been acrimonious ever since, although a lawsuit in 2009 held that Musk, Eberhard, Tarpenning and two other early execs could all refer to themselves as Tesla’s co-founders. Still, in the popular imagination, Musk is now synonymous with the EV brand.