Filmmaker Alex Gibney has made an exhaustive and unflattering documentary about Elon Musk. Social media firms are said to be refusing to advertise it. Alex Gibney’s epic, four-hour long documentary about billionaire Elon Musk opens in US cinemas in October. Just don’t expect to see anything advertising the fact on social media. According to a ... Musk | Social media platforms are refusing to run ads for Alex Gibney’s documentary
Filmmaker Alex Gibney has made an exhaustive and unflattering documentary about Elon Musk. Social media firms are said to be refusing to advertise it.
Alex Gibney’s epic, four-hour long documentary about billionaire Elon Musk opens in US cinemas in October. Just don’t expect to see anything advertising the fact on social media.
According to a report at The Hollywood Reporter, indie distributor Bleecker Street has been trying to place adverts for Musk on such platforms as YouTube, TikTok and Facebook, only for them to be rejected.
X (formerly Twitter) has also refused to advertise Musk, though given its owner is Elon Musk himself – who’s already dismissed Gibney as a “bitter old man” and threatened to sue the filmmaker – that’s probably not too surprising.
There’s no particular reason why other platforms shouldn’t run paid advertising for the documentary, though. YouTube, TikTok and Meta are said to have turned the ad down because it contains “political content”; but as THR points out, this sounds suspiciously like an excuse.
Meta’s policies over political advertising are designed to prevent it from influencing election results – the mid-term primaries are coming up in the US – but Musk isn’t said to contain much about Donald Trump beyond a shot or two at a 2024 political rally.
From the outside looking in, it sounds suspiciously like the billionaires are circling the wagons. Facebook is owned by Mark Zuckerberg; in the US, TikTok is co-owned by a group of investors which includes Oracle founder Larry Ellison – a friend of Musk’s.
Musk also appears to be making its global distributor, Universal Pictures, a bit nervous. Earlier this month, it was reported that Universal was mulling the possibility of returning the rights to Bleecker Street rather than release it in cinemas. It’s now being reported that a final decision hasn’t been made by Universal executives, and that it may opt to release the film after all.
Bleecker Street is said to be appealing the decisions made by those platforms. Musk is screening at the London Film Festival on the 9th and 10th October.
Image credit: Brian Sollis. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.
Suggested product
Issue #60 Magazine Bundle (3x Covers: A Scanner Darkly Magazine + 1991 + Roger Deakins)
£14.99
