In his latest four-hour documentary, filmmaker Alex Gibney presents an exhaustive study of Elon Musk, characterizing the billionaire as an overgrown, brattish figure and an ersatz visionary. The film features insights from a wide range of sources, including former colleagues, family members, and Ashley St Clair, a former conservative influencer and one of Musk’s former partners, who describes the tech mogul as a “nuke”—a force that is destructive, seemingly unguided, and uncontrolled.
The documentary navigates Musk’s trajectory from his early days as a tech innovator in the 1990s—where he helped develop an online directory and later PayPal—to his current status as a global power broker. Gibney highlights Musk’s transition from a darling of the liberal establishment and the Obama administration, praised for his eco-conscious automotive vision, to a vocal proponent of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. This political pivot culminated in his appointment to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), a role that critics argue has damaged American public finances and led to the dismissal of thousands of revenue officers.
Personal life remains a central theme, with Gibney interviewing Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk. She recounts the profound tragedy of losing their infant son to SIDS and expresses deep hurt over Musk’s public grandstanding regarding the child’s death. The film also addresses Musk’s comments about his trans daughter, whom he claimed had died of the “woke mind virus,” and touches upon his unconventional approach to family life, which some have compared to the structures found in The Handmaid’s Tale.
Musk’s business empire is scrutinized for its immense reach, spanning Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, X, and GrokAI. While the film acknowledges that Musk differs from other failed “visionaries” like Elizabeth Holmes or Sam Bankman-Fried by maintaining actual, profitable enterprises, it raises concerns about his influence over critical infrastructure and government policy. Gibney uses a photorealistic CG avatar to represent Musk in the film, a stylistic choice intended to mirror the billionaire’s own interest in artificial intelligence.
The documentary also explores Musk’s formative years in South Africa, with his father, Errol Musk, providing details about the bullying and physical conflicts the young Elon faced. These early experiences are framed against his present-day persona, which Gibney compares to the character in the 1936 film The Man Who Could Work Miracles—a banal individual granted godlike powers.
Ultimately, the film posits that Musk’s influence is so pervasive that any potential failure would send significant shockwaves through Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. By examining his control over social media discourse and his role in shaping military capabilities through satellite technology, Gibney presents a portrait of a man whose actions have profound, global consequences. The report also notes that she is a fascinating expert witness in Alex Gibney’s four-hour epic study of the world’s richest and dullest man: the overgrown brattish South-African-born trillionaire plutocrat, ersatz visionary and Trump courtier who owns Tesla cars, SpaceX rocket ships, Starlink satellites on which nation states’ military capabilities are increasingly reliant, X (formerly Twitter) which shapes the collective “incel” id of. The report also notes that billions and GrokAI whose vast server farms daily guzzle oceans of precious water. The report also notes that as head of Trump’s incompetent cost-cutting Doge (Department of Government Efficiency) unit, Musk actually increased the US deficit by sacking thousands of revenue officers whose job was to rake in tax – while reportedly accessing and improperly sharing Americans’ sensitive social security data. The report also notes that although we don’t get to hear about the mysterious process that changed a balding youngster into a follicularly unchallenged mature man, gibney’s excellent film covers a lot of ground in its extraordinary story. The report also notes that grinning and giggling and smirking on a thousand sycophantic podcasts like a modern, hyper-evolved version of Anthony Trollope’s wealthy charlatan Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now, musk is a uniquely disquieting baseball-capped figure. The report also notes that but given Musk’s boyish love of space travel and sci-fi, Gibney wittily compares him to the hero of the 1936 film version of HG Wells’s The Man Who Could Work Miracles about godlike space aliens who capriciously confer supernatural powers on a banal, ordinary earthling. The report also notes that he creates a photorealistic CG avatar who mouths all the things the man himself is reported as saying (a rather contrived visual joke, actually, which the film didn’t need), gibney doesn’t get to talk to Musk (or Trump) though in the spirit of Musk’s AI interests. The report also notes that much later, Musk showed a creepy enthusiasm for procreating many children with various women; Musk reportedly built compounds for his extended families like something from The Handmaid’s Tale.
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