Acclaimed filmmaker Alex Gibney has spent several years making a documentary about tech billionaire Elon Musk. It’s out this year and runs for four hours. Fittingly, for a public figure closely associated with ridiculously large numbers, Elon Musk is the subject of filmmaker’s Alex Gibney latest documentary, which is approximately four hours long. The film, ... Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk documentary is a mere four hours long
Acclaimed filmmaker Alex Gibney has spent several years making a documentary about tech billionaire Elon Musk. It’s out this year and runs for four hours.
Fittingly, for a public figure closely associated with ridiculously large numbers, Elon Musk is the subject of filmmaker’s Alex Gibney latest documentary, which is approximately four hours long.
The film, simply called Musk, is due to make its debut at the Venice and Toronto film festivals this October, and organisers are already bracing themselves for an outsized backlash from the tech billionaire and his army of acolytes.
“We’re talking about someone who has a Marvel villain-like level of power over our lives, from electric cars to space travel to AI to government to social media,” Toronto Film Festival boss Thom Powers said to The Hollywood Reporter. “And you have Alex Gibney making the most ambitious movie of his illustrious career about him.”
Although this isn’t the first documentary about Musk, Gibney has a deserved reputation for using his films to investigate power structures and the systems that hold them in place. His earlier work has dug into dodgy corporations and institutional greed (Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, Dirty Money), and the murkier side of public figures (The Armstrong Lie, Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine).
Read more: Elon Musk absolutely should make his AI version of The Odyssey
Gibney has been working on his Musk piece for at least four years, and while he isn’t thought to have secured an interview with the title subject, he’s interviewed a number of people in his immediate orbit, including colleagues and family members. Musk himself has already dismissed the documentary as a “hit piece”, though at present, only Gibney and his collaborators know what kind of angle the film will take.
The film emerges amid a growing disquiet about the power that ultra-wealthy people like Musk wield over the planet. Journalist Gil Duran’s new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy argues that technology and politics are now in the sway of a handful of billionaires with increasingly disturbing views; Musk alone has his tendrils in a gigantic social media service (once called Twitter), took an axe to government agencies through the Trump administration’s DOGE initiative, and generally uses his platform to spread hate and right-wing conspiracy theories.
Then there’s his Grok AI tech, which has been used to generate and share sexualised, non-consensual images of women, many of them underage. It’s all unspeakably grim.
“If we don’t fight back, we don’t have a future,” Duran recently told The Guardian.
Musk is due to appear in US cinemas on the 16th October – with an interval, due to its length – before appearing on HBO later this year. Here’s hoping it at least tries to hold its subject to account.
