Director Alex Gibney began working on his exhaustive documentary in 2022 as a business story investigating how the world’s richest man inflated his own value. But as political tides changed, particularly following the 2024 shooting of Donald Trump, the project evolved into an examination of unchecked authority. Clocking in at nearly four hours with a 10-minute intermission, the film treats its subject not as a visionary technologist, but as an emotionally unstable figure wielding immense global powers with zero empathy.
Gibney Investigates Four-Hour Horror Story About Modern Power
Gibney brings a track record of investigating institutional rot, having previously dissected corporate corruption in Enron,
and Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in The Inventor.
In Musk,
that analytical eye turns toward tech-era grandiosity. The director uses a CGI avatar of Musk voiced by existing audio recordings, accompanied by first-person shooter visual motifs that position Musk as a player moving real people like non-player characters.
Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist.” It appears that he is more interested in FEE speech. https://t.co/lPtkgzVviL
Gibney Dismantles the Myth of the Founder
The documentary dismantles Musk’s self-mythology from its roots. After selling PayPal for his two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar payout, Musk invested in Tesla, a company originally launched by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.
Rather than portraying Tesla as an earnest vehicle for environmental salvation, the film presents it as an enterprise that used government-issued climate credits and overpromised on autonomous driving capabilities that never materialized. Conversely, the documentary grants a humanizing lens to SpaceX, featuring archival clips of Musk visibly emotional during early rocket launch failures before celebrating the eventual success of reusable rockets.
Alex Gibney is obviously going to make the most convincingly terrible hit piece on me that he can possibly think of. He’s a douchebag to his core and, in his own words, incredibly biased against me. https://t.co/RegprpMxZE
Ashley St. Clair Reveals Dealings With Musk
Personal entanglements and legal friction shadow the film’s release. Former right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair participated directly in the documentary. She revealed that shortly before Election Day 2024, Musk told her he felt optimistic because tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix,
pointing to a network of active space lasers.
St. Clair also detailed her dealings with Musk’s longtime financial adviser, Jared Birchall, who supplied a tiered child-support agreement dependent on her signing a strict nondisclosure agreement. When she balked, her support payments were slashed. The film features interviews with Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk, who reflects on the corrupting nature of power.
Legal threats preceded the project’s public screenings. Musk himself dismissed the project on X by labeling it a hit piece
and calling the filmmaker a douche.
Musk Gains DOGE Access Ahead of Midterms
The documentary connects Musk’s corporate empire directly to his entrance into right-wing American politics and his oversight of the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE. Gibney shows how the young staff appointed to DOGE accessed and archived a trove of U.S. citizen data while scaling back or jettisoning government agencies and programs.
Reporting indicates Musk has poured $366 million into supporting Republican campaigns, while his company SpaceX has secured over $8 billion in U.S. military contracts in this year alone. With the midterm elections underway, the filmmaker has urged audiences to watch the project before casting ballots.
If I was to hazard a guess, it had to do with not the switching of votes, but with the reporting of votes, and that he knew sooner than anybody else did because, you know, out of the voting systems, there are things that appear on the internet, and if you know how to hack into them, you can get real-time data.
