What’s the actual value of a documentary about Elon Musk in 2026, let alone an exhaustive one that runs nearly four hours long? Like President Trump, Musk is a buffoon with a disheartening level of influence over nearly every person on Earth. Musk not only operates under constant public scrutiny, but is also a shameless self-promoter and prolific poster who tweets — or whatever the term is since Musk purchased Twitter and rebranded it as X — to his 241 million followers close to 100 times a day. How does a subject lend themselves to an exposé when they’re also constantly boasting about the evil shit they’ve done on their favorite manosphere podcast or sharing white-nationalist talking points online? Such is the challenge facing the hugely prolific documentarian Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), whose talking heads and archival-heavy films have in the past sought to drag into the light organizations and individuals (the Catholic Church, the Church of Scientology, Enron, Theranos, etc.) who operated in the shadows and consolidated power through obfuscation. What is there even to be said about a man who owns the world’s loudest megaphone?
Gibney’s new film, Musk, offers little in the way of stunning revelations that weren’t already part of the public record, and what the film presents as new information is a little dubious on its face — including an unverified claim by Musk’s former paramour and excommunicated MAGA influencer, Ashley St. Clair, that Musk possessed eerily accurate polling data on Election Night 2024, hours before the information was publicly disseminated. But what it provides instead is something that has more organizational value. Over its 235-minute runtime — which includes a 10-minute intermission as part of the film’s theatrical release, before it finds a permanent home on HBO — Gibney untangles and lays bare Musk’s fraudulent self-made mythology that found him elbowing aside actual innovators in order to receive the lion’s share of credit for companies he didn’t start, repeatedly failing up and exploiting the technology gap that exists between politicians and Silicon Valley to enrich himself at the expense of taxpayers. Confronting a subject seemingly incapable of introspection or remorse — another trait he possibly shares with the current president — Gibney builds a biography for a titan of industry who is motivated almost entirely by grievance, insecurity, and pettiness: someone who built an empire in order to nurture a cult-like army of social media followers that exists solely to endorse his flop-sweat attempts at humor, an army of baby mamas raising a future generation of acolytes, and even spinning up a possibly world-destroying AI model simply to validate his wingnut opinions and conspiracy theories. It’s not so much the story of one man as it is a microcosm for living under the yoke of the biggest fucking losers on the planet.
Unsurprisingly, Musk declined to participate in Gibney’s doc — according to the film, the only interaction between the two men ended with Musk publicly calling Gibney a “douche” on X — which led the filmmaker to one of his more skin-crawling decisions. Combing through hundreds of hours of publicly available statements, the film renders a nearly photo-realistic, computer-generated Musk avatar — the filmmakers have been coy as to whether this is AI or is the work of living, breathing animators — to “sit” for an interview that is ribboned throughout the film and offer his perspective on any number of subjects. You can tell it’s not real because “Musk’s” head is slightly too large for his body, and also because he actually has a jawline.
Progressing in roughly chronological order, the film picks up with Musk in his mid-20s as a balding coder and aspiring entrepreneur behind the dot com startup Zip2, an online directory company that was sold to Compaq with Musk personally earning $22 million from the sale. Pivoting to co-creating the e-commerce service that would eventually become PayPal, Musk is eventually pushed out of the company by aspiring Bond villain Peter Thiel, although not without retaining his stock options, valued at $176 million, when the company sold to eBay in 2002.
This establishes a pattern of behavior of Musk glomming onto companies and elevating himself at the expense of the introverted engineers who actually created them (in the documentary’s telling, there’s real currency in being listed as a founder when raising capital, which is why Musk is listed as the “founder” of SpaceX instead of the person who actually launched the company). Parlaying each new windfall into a bold new endeavor inspired by an unhappy childhood spent reading too many comic books, Musk puts his imprint on space exploration and electric cars, cozying up to technocrat politicians who increasingly looked to the private sector to solve the nation’s problems, dangling lucrative tax incentives and government contracts with minimal oversight to entrepreneurs like Musk who overpromise and underdeliver (the original sin of Musk’s meteoric accumulation of wealth is the Obama administration mothballing the space shuttle program, which created the initial toehold for SpaceX). Through it all, we get glimpses of Musk’s personal life and how it shaped his wounded psychology: being raised by an abusive, bigoted father in Apartheid era-South Africa and bullied at school for being an insensitive brat, losing an infant to SIDS and subsequently disowning his trans daughter (Musk blames the “woke mind virus” for “killing” the person he still misgenders as his son), all while becoming increasingly obsessed with video games as a metaphor for evolutionary advances in technology and simulation theory as a governing worldview.
Gibney really emphasizes that last bit by frequently employing video game interfaces and simulated game screens to illustrate his larger points. And while it breaks up the visual monotony of the film, it can verge on glib, particularly when depicting Musk’s mass layoffs as a first-person shooter where animated NPCs are vaporized by bolts of energy, shot from Musk’s outstretched arms, while he racks up capitalism points. A few attention-grabbing flourishes aside, the film is primarily an info-dump, leveraging interviews with the likes of Kara Swisher, Sam Harris, and the journalist Zoë Schiffer. Its eventful (if still fresh in our collective memories) second half interrogates Musk’s motives for purchasing Twitter for exponentially more than its worth, and in the process creating an echo chamber for edgelords and sycophants at the expense of the platform’s user experience and long-term profitability. We also get the blow-by-blow of Musk’s “evolution” from an environmentalist champion evangelizing renewable energy and STEM to a Republican mega-donor behind the slash-and-burn government agency DOGE. For all the colorful anecdotes about scamming the government with carbon credit swaps or manipulating the X algorithm so his posts will garner more eyeballs than Joe Biden’s own tweets, the film really starts to prime the viewer’s rage center the more it delves into Tesla’s shoddy self-driving cars that resulted in the deaths of dozens of people — the film asserts that the actual reason Musk embraced Trump was to insulate himself from federal prosecution — as well as the reckless disregard for human lives abroad and the livelihood of civil servants with the indiscriminate dismantling of government agencies like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by reddit trolls under his employ, most barely old enough to purchase Four Lokos. As the film makes clear time and time again, Musk barely comprehends the things he destroys, often creating larger problems than the ones he set out to solve in the first place.
The time commitment required in watching a four-hour-long documentary all but demands a certain level of pre-existing investment in a topic, and Musk runs the risk of preaching exclusively to the choir (sight unseen, Elon declared the film a hatchet job and has been rallying his legion of followers to defend him against the film’s claims while also urging them not to watch it). But to his credit, there’s a real cogency to Gibney’s prosecution of the case, in spite of its innate sprawl; the film cleanly illustrates with abundant examples how Musk’s boastful claims failed to manifest in reality and how frequently he placed his own self-serving agenda ahead of the greater good. Musk concludes with a chilling omen of what’s to come, with its titular subject turning his attention to artificial intelligence, a technology Musk was once wary of as an existential threat — until he realized he could program it to reaffirm how smart and handsome he is. Whether it’s self-driving cars that plow into pedestrians, mobilizing xenophobic sentiment around the globe, or building a glorified chatbot that won’t stop praising Hitler, the main takeaway from the film is that Musk is more moody dilettante and recreational drug addict than a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci, and that there’s very real consequences for those of us subject to his capricious whims, prejudices, and intellectual laziness. It’s very likely you knew that already, so treat the film as a wealth of ammunition at your fingertips for the next time you find yourself stuck sitting next to a conservative relative who feels compelled to call Musk a “genius.” After all, Thanksgiving is arriving soon.
DIRECTOR: Alex Gibney; CAST: Elon Musk; DISTRIBUTOR: Bleecker Street; IN THEATERS: October 9; RUNTIME: 3 hr. 55 min.
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