Musk, Alex Gibney’s latest documentary, is nearly four hours long with a ten-minute intermission, which is surely more time than any well-adjusted person wants to spend thinking about Elon Musk. It’s to Gibney’s credit as a master storyteller and an experienced chronicler of elite malfeasance in films like Going Clear and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room that Musk engages and rivets throughout, even if it left me wanting both a shower and a drink.
Musk declined to be interviewed for the film. Instead he called Gibney a “douche” on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk acquired for $44 billion in 2022 and promptly set about ruining. Gibney could have just relied on the abundant existing footage of his subject, but he went a step further, asking his research team to set up a database of all of Musk’s recorded interviews and then creating a computer-generated Musk avatar who appears to be responding to an interviewer using real statements Musk has made. It’s an unsettling gimmick, and would be objectionable in any other context, but it works here; as Gibney notes, Musk has repeated for years the popular theory that what we experience as real life is most likely a computer-generated simulation, essentially a videogame. Gibney makes this conceit literal throughout, portraying Musk as he sees himself—as the main character in a simulated digital environment in which other people are “non-player characters,” or NPCs, to be acted upon without conscience or scruple. It’s a sociopathic worldview, and what makes Musk so effective is that by the end of it, you feel as though you’ve personally been trapped in Musk’s simulation. And, well, aren’t we all?
We glimpse reality through more than a dozen unsimulated interview subjects, ranging from tech journalists (Kara Swisher, Wired’s Katie Drummond and Zoë Schiffer) to former business partners (Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, SpaceX co-founder Jim Cantrell) to former paramours and mothers of Musk’s many children (ex-wife Justine, the right-wing social media influencer Ashley St. Clair) to former government officials (Joe Biden’s USAID chief Samantha Power, Barack Obama’s deputy NASA administrator Lori Garver) to immediate family members (Musk’s brother, mother, and father). Most of the information Gibney presents in Musk has been previously reported, though it’s illuminating to see it all laid out here; what original revelations there are come from getting to know the various people Musk has collected, used, and discarded on his way to becoming the richest person in history.
The portrait that emerges is of an empty, hateful, emotionally stunted man whose two superpowers are shameless self-promotion and a remarkable ability to hack weaknesses in the regulatory state. These are both talents Musk shares with his erstwhile ally Donald Trump, of course, but Trump does have one other thing going for him: his undeniable borscht belt charisma. As awful as Trump is, it’s not hard to see how he won over a significant swath of the American electorate, and analogous right-wing populists have enjoyed similar success in other democratic systems around the world. Musk, by contrast, has always been a try hard, a loser at his core no matter how often he wins. Past acquaintances describe him as preternaturally confident, and while there’s no question he is ambitious, onscreen he comes across at all life stages as an insecure and awkward creep, incapable of joy or even of Trump’s campy schtick. How, Gibney’s film asks, did such a creature accumulate such immense influence, and what does it say about the rest of us that we allowed it to happen?
Part of the answer lies in Silicon Valley’s cult of the founder. The film shows Musk making a conscious effort to present himself as an engineer at SpaceX, an actual builder of reusable rockets, with a montage of him dressed in modest button-downs and khakis to fit in with his workers. In reality, he was the son of a wealthy South African who leveraged some family seed money into a series of ventures in the first Dot Com bubble. He also took pains to establish himself as the driving force behind Tesla and to downplay the contributions of co-founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. (In 2009, Eberhard filed a lawsuit against Musk for calling himself a “founder” of the company; in a settlement, Musk established the right to use that title.) Gibney astutely observes that Wall Street buys into this genius founder myth and has consistently overvalued anything Musk is involved in, further boosting his clout.
Liberal policy initiatives also deserve a share of the blame. As the first half of Musk reminds us, Musk built his empire largely during Barack Obama’s presidency, taking advantage of federal incentives to replicate NASA functions for private profit. Garver, the Obama appointee at NASA who worked closely with SpaceX, still seems to admire Musk’s work in that era even as she’s aware of his subsequent depravities, and as we see in news footage from the time, Obama himself was similarly impressed. So were California’s governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and later Gavin Newsom, who allowed Tesla to game the state’s climate incentives for additional free money. As Gibney shows, Tesla gained tens of millions of dollars’ worth of zero-emission vehicle credits by claiming to operate facilities in California that could swap out an electric vehicle’s battery in under three minutes; only one such station was ever opened, in a remote part of the state, and the general public was never granted access to see how this alleged battery swap miracle worked.
The friendliness of officials toward Musk is juxtaposed with an epic trail of destruction. Gibney talks to a lawyer in Florida who has taken Tesla to court over its misleadingly marketed self-driving cars, which have been involved in at least 60 deaths of both drivers and innocent pedestrians. He later shows Musk gutting the federal bureaucracy through his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, starting in early 2025—dramatized in part by an original first-person shooter scenario in which our point of view is a DOGE agent rampaging through a government office. And he reminds us of the millions of people in the global south who have been cut off from life-saving assistance since DOGE dismantled the United States Agency for International Development. Samantha Power, the last head of USAID, chokes up on camera as she contemplates the gratuitous suffering Musk has inflicted on the world’s poorest people.
Sam Harris, the celebrity neuroscientist and New Atheist, suggests in an interview with Gibney that the pandemic and social media are responsible for his former friend Musk’s descent into egomania and his embrace of the far right. Early in 2020, Musk tweeted that Covid-19 was producing an irrational panic, and when Harris objected, Musk bet Harris $1 million against a bottle of tequila that fewer than 35,000 Americans would die. After that grim benchmark was swiftly cleared, Musk abruptly ended his friendship with Harris, and his behavior has only gotten more erratic and his politics more reactionary from there. Anyone who was on Twitter back then could see its algorithms and an echo chamber of millions of fans warping Musk’s brain in real time, and when he purchased the platform two years later, he recalibrated it, immersing those who still use it (including Gibney, and me) in racist memes, conspiracy theories, and worse. We’ve all seen social media and pandemic isolation distort once-rational minds, but Musk’s issues go back much further; though the film doesn’t cover his childhood in South Africa until after its intermission, it’s clear that his father Errol, whom Musk has called “a terrible human being,” left deep marks. At one point in the documentary, Errol describes in gruesome detail how he once apparently shot and killed three intruders in the Musk family home, covering it in blood.
Musk balances a critique of the wider structures that have empowered its subject with an attempt to illustrate Musk’s twisted subjectivity, which it suggests we are all now forced to share in. You can delete your Twitter account, but you’re nonetheless stuck in a world where Musk has enormous power. Gibney shows him cutting deals and developing warm personal relationships with Trump, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan to globally expand his businesses—in particular Starlink, which controls thousands of satellites over all our heads, and with which Musk can sway the battlefields of Ukraine by denying or granting access. The gap between how frivolous Musk appears and what he is capable of beggars belief.
Some of the mystique that Musk markets to the public, Gibney demonstrates, comes from familiar science fiction tropes, from his oft-repeated promise to colonize Mars to his obsession with artificial intelligence (despite having warned of AI’s dangers, in the past few years Musk has gone all in on the technology; his trademark LLM, Grok, is responsible for the production of millions of nude images of real people). Searching for an analogy to Musk, Gibney lands on the 1937 British film The Man Who Could Work Miracles, based on an 1898 story by H.G. Wells, in which an ordinary man is granted godlike powers to reshape reality, and becomes increasingly autocratic and dangerous as he attempts to impose a utopian new order on the world; eventually, he stops the earth from rotating, effectively destroying human civilization.
Musk himself seems aware that calamities on that scale could lie ahead. For instance, he envisions a Darwinian civil war between the races in the United Kingdom in which only those blessed with what he considers superior genes will survive. According to Ashley St. Clair in the film, that’s one reason why he is frantically inseminating women in a bizarre natalist quest. Musk has 14 known children through four mothers, one of whom, St. Clair, refused to sign the NDA that she claims Musk has offered to numerous other women, some of whom she’s in touch with. (Much of this was reported in The Wall Street Journal last year; the reporter, Dana Mattioli, also talks to Gibney.) In addition to turning down millions of dollars in hush money by blowing the whistle on Musk’s bizarre behavior, St. Clair has endured harassment and intimidation, which she details on camera; she also seems to have become alienated from the MAGA movement she supported as recently as the 2024 election.
Vivian Jenna Wilson, born in 2004 and one of five surviving children from Musk’s first marriage, is a trans woman whom Musk has declared dead to him, killed by the “woke mind virus.” Gibney didn’t interview Vivian, but he includes footage of her saying that her mother Justine Musk has fought for her heroically, and we get to know Justine at greater length. It’s clear she is a formidable, intelligent, and humane woman who was charmed by Elon’s ambition and then casually abandoned by him. She was patient zero for how Musk has gone on to treat the whole human species. If there is any trace of hope in Gibney’s film, it’s in Justine’s obvious commitment to her children as real individuals whose lives have meaning and dignity, and who aren’t just NPCs in someone else’s video game.