When you find out the subject of your documentary refuses to participate in your movie, it’s usually a death knell for your film. Well, most subjects of your documentary aren’t Elon Musk, one of the most quoted/photographed man on the planet so you basically don’t need him. And, maybe more importantly, most documentarians aren’t Alex Gibney, the most thorough, well respected documentarians working in the business. That fortuitous series of circumstances has led to Musk, a VERY comprehensive, exhaustive, and exhausting dissection of one of our most important, divisive public figures. You won’t feel better after 4 hours in Elon’s world, but you won’t have to think too hard about him for a while cause you saw it all.
Gibney puts his head to the grind and goes through 4 detailed hours of Elon’s rise in the United States. We see bits of his South African family, then flash forward to the late 1990s early Internet era, where Elon started building his early companies. Then it’s onto Tesla, SpaceX, and his engineering era trying to bring science fiction to life. That’s about the halfway point. Then we obviously start to shift as Elon starts to shift into politics, detailing his purchase of Twitter (X), and his attempt to DOGE the US government to his will, finishing where we are right now today, passing out from a mixture of boredom, shock, and exasperation…and fear of video game Elon.
That’s right, on top of the heaps of video archives coming at us, Gibney tries to include as much of his soundbites and tweets as possible too. Believing Elon partially at least thinks he’s in a video game simulation, Gibney generates artificial Elon, using those soundbites with the creepy moderately human Musk to say all these other things so we hear as much as we can from out of “Elon’s” mouth. You really feel very few stones are unturned with Gibney’s approach to Musk, except when he got his hair transplant. Like a good journalist, Gibney unfeelingly goes through the information in relatively linear time format, presenting assumptions about the man, and then presenting data (talking heads, journalistic research) to either prove or disprove those assumptions. There’s so much in here you’re bound to learn something. For example, I thought Elon was Tesla’s founder; turns out that is Martin Eberhard, who certainly has, um, certain feelings about Elon coming in and usurping his company. Gibney finds a pattern of personality in Elon’s rise, where he firmly believes in his god complex, and every person, business, or government around him musk fall in line (you’re welcome) or face Elon’s consequences. We also get insights into what happens when Elon is proven more weak and human, like the scary footage of one of the self-driving cars and how Musk handled this crisis. Spoiler: not super well.
That’s the other key finding Gibney also finds another characteristic of his subject by the time we hit the 2010s: efficiency. By efficiency, Gibney means Elon gets what he wants by any means necessary “for the greater good.” Terrifying words in the hands of a man who thinks he’s better than most people. The 2nd half of Musk outlines all the fallout of Elon’s push for humanity’s progress…and especially all the people left behind in his wake. Part of his belief system: sire ALL the children. Instead of building a society of like minded people, Elon sees his mission as having a society of HIM, probably worshipping him as a god. There’s one little problem with this: Elon can’t reproduce on his own (yet). There are sobering, very damning interviews with his ex Justine Musk and especially Ashley St. Clair detailing just how much Elon mostly cares about being “put out to stud” instead of actually parenting, since again, he’s the god and has to progress society so he has no time for puny things like feelings or parent teacher conferences. These poor women get lured in by his weird magnetism and become infatuated with him. But after the kid is born, like American society, Elon peaces out, leaving alimony payments as his only involvement for the most part. Musk’s darkside really comes out around this time: disowning his transgender daughter and going in public to shame them for their choices. He posits all that time inside X and with Trump really poisons his thoughts and removes him further and further from reality. By the time we get to DOGE, Elon is edgelord pilled, completely cocksure of himself and his ability to do to the US government what he did with all his businesses. The last 20 minutes or so are the fallout of Elon’s fight with the President, painting a picture we expect, but one that is still unfortunate that Elon Musk, in all his brilliance, still has yet to do himself what he demands Grok (X’s AI) and all the people around him do on a daily basis: learn.
For all the mention of progress, Musk is very old school in its design. Old isn’t bad; Alex Gibney’s classic approach with a bit of visual flair gets its point across, over and over again. You can be mad that the doc is 4 hours long, but you can’t be mad with Gibney’s mission: giving all of us full insight into a man who has some of the greatest influence on current American and even the world society. Importantly, as Gibney proves: MAN, not a god. Sorry Elon, go to Mars and you can have the people call you a god there instead.