Alex Gibney Doc Digs Deep on World’s Richest Man

Not long after news first emerged three years ago that Alex Gibney had begun work on an in-depth study of Elon Musk, the uber-tech bro went on the defensive on his social media platform, Twitter. Sorry, I mean X. “It’s a hit piece,” he cried, before switching to the totally mature “Gibney is a douche.” It must have been no surprise to the filmmaker that his subject would decline to make himself available for Musk, a whopping documentary think piece running close to four hours, which traces in dense detail the dizzying ascent to stratospheric wealth and influence of the man who dreams of colonizing Mars.

Gibney’s solution to that key absence turns out to be a stroke of creative genius. After having his team pull together a data base with every statement Musk had ever made and every interview he had ever given, the director’s digital effects crew set about developing an AI avatar to address the camera as if in a sit-down chat from a gaming chair, sticking strictly to the billionaire business mogul’s own words.

What could be more appropriate for a subject who has hypothesized that we could all be living in a computer-generated base reality, a simulation controlled by some future power, as if all of humanity might be player characters in a video game? Gibney digs into the extent to which Musk’s ambitions were shaped early on by vintage sci-fi movies and books, though many have pointed out that he seemed to miss the anti-capitalist satire of one of his key inspirations, Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, instead treating it like a manual for technological advancement at any cost.

This is the man who wants to ensure the survival of human civilization while our own planet teeters toward the abyss? If you buy that, Gibney seems to suggest, he has a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The filmmaker has likened his perspective in this project to that of Dorothy’s dog Toto in The Wizard of Oz, alert to the shuffling feet beneath the curtain rather than being bamboozled by the shyster title character’s techno showmanship.

With a clarity that makes his conclusions hard to refute and a wealth of visual material, spiffy graphics and insightful interviews to keep it interesting throughout the epic run time, Gibney pulls back the curtain, charting the path of the South African whiz kid, who grew up under apartheid and has never denounced the racially discriminatory regime. 

The film hopscotches from Musk’s first U.S. software company, Zip2 — the sale of which netted him $22 million despite the enterprise never having turned an operational profit — through the key business ventures that helped consolidate his power and multiply his net worth. 

Those steppingstones include the purchase of Twitter, which soon cratered in value but became a crucial bullhorn to legitimize his partly illusory personal narrative for a devoted cult, sweeping the stated goal of promoting free speech under the rug. This was a logical extension of what Musk’s first wife, Justine Wilson, considers his strategic gaslighting skills, allowing him to shape exactly the image he sought to project, not of an investor but of a visionary inventor. That’s why it was so important to Musk to be credited as the founder of Tesla, which would come as news to engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.

Gibney paints Musk as an unabashed megalomaniac. He ventures outside the professional sphere to touch on the “legions of children,” as someone describes them; the disposable “breeders”; the drug use; and the father who seems like a nightmarish piece of work. But the gossipy tidbits almost pale next to the eye-opening shadiness of some of the business strategies.

The Tesla chapter is compelling less for the success of launching electric vehicles on the market than the more inconvenient factors that somehow went ignored — from falsehoods about the time required to swap out a battery pack to the playing down of fatalities that resulted from glitches in self-driving cars, reported to have caused at least 65 deaths.

Around the same time, Musk mastered the art of stock manipulation, as well as securing government handouts and energy credits. He’s now inextricably linked with Republican Party politics and more specifically Donald Trump. But the film notes that although foundational funding for Musk’s SpaceX rocket program came from the George W. Bush administration, along with a $1.6 billion contract that reportedly rescued the division from looming bankruptcy, it was the Obama administration that honored and expanded on the initiative through NASA. In retrospect, that now looks like an uncharacteristically laissez-faire decision.

Gibney lays out the shift by which Musk turned away from the Democrats to align himself for personal gain with Trump, in what many believe was a case of him buying the 2024 election, funneling close to $300 million into the campaign. 

That opened the door to the infamous DOGE purge. Musk unleashed a team of 19-to-22-year-old Silicon Valley bros to kneecap government agencies of which they had zero understanding. But crucially, they did understand those agencies’ IT systems, giving them access to classified programs and Americans’ personal information. Some of the tech reporters interviewed maintain that all that data has been used to link pension funds and 401ks to SpaceX, creating a precarious balance.

While the formation of DOGE, during which Musk bounced around the Oval Office like a kid in a candy store, was positioned as a cost-cutting measure and an assault on fraud and waste, by decimating the IRS, the department substantially increased the federal deficit. DOGE’s primary achievement now appears to have been hobbling government agencies to block all investigations of Musk’s companies.

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While the entire section of Gibney’s film on DOGE has the sobering effect of a corruption exposé and the fear factor of a ‘70s conspiracy thriller, the cruelest part of it all is the dismantling of USAID, the independent government department for international development founded by JFK in 1961. It’s estimated that 14 million lives in developing countries will be lost because of DOGE cuts, 4.5 million of them kids under 5. 

“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk says at one point. “Time for it to die.” His stunt with “the chainsaw for bureaucracy” now looks like the most juvenile theatrics, especially given that hundreds of federal workers had to be rehired when their departments stopped functioning, in some cases receiving back-pay for the interim months. 

One of the most sinister examples of cause and effect in this culling is the immediate suspension, after Trump signed the executive order, of medical and nutritional aid for children. An emotional former USAID employee recounts how 500 pounds of food destined for starving children was already on the ground but could not be distributed because of the government veto, meaning it was allowed to pass its expiration date and then be destroyed.

Musk himself provides the key to comprehending how people in power could be so heartless when he calls empathy “a bug in Western civilization.” His rants about the “woke-mind virus” are both disturbing and tiresome, and his flair for self-dramatizing outrage is illustrated by comments about his trans daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson. “My son Xavier is dead,” Musk famously said, using his now-estranged offspring’s birth name. “Killed by the woke-mind virus.” 

Perhaps the loudest alarm set off by Gibney’s movie is the section devoted to Musk’s complete turnaround on AI. After initially coming out as a skeptic, he pivoted to full-steam-ahead with minimal regulation once he established his xAI offshoot — which quickly landed a contract with Pete Hegseth’s ignominiously renamed “Department of War.” Then there’s his chatbot Grok, which malfunctioned and self-generated an anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi rebrand dubbed “MechaHitler,” not to mention generating nude images of real women and girls. 

Of course, Musk’s distance from the project — which Bleecker Street will release Oct. 16 with a 10-minute intermission, ahead of its HBO premiere some time next year, provided Larry Ellison doesn’t run interference and have it shelved — means there’s no rebuttal here. But most people who sign up for the doc will have long ago made up their minds about Musk, so a one-sided argument won’t be a problem. 

Gibney’s films can occasionally seem more like the assembly work of his diligent research team, but he’s passionately engaged and fired up here, plugged into Michael J. Palmer’s punchy editing and some choice needle drops woven in among Daniel Pemberton’s textured score, with lots of churning synths. The end credits feature a thematically appropriate original David Byrne song, “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” co-written with Pemberton.

It’s legitimate to wonder how healthy it is for anyone to sit in simmering outrage for 225 minutes, but I simply could not look away. Musk may not tell us a lot that’s not already out there to some degree, but it collates a ton of information in a very persuasive package that will leave many audiences chilled to the bone. To put it crudely, my first thought on exiting the screening room was, “We’re fucked.”