In his latest four-hour documentary, filmmaker Alex Gibney presents an expansive examination of Elon Musk, characterizing the South African-born billionaire as a figure of immense influence and profound banality. The film features a wide array of voices, including former associates, family members, and Ashley St Clair, a former conservative influencer and one of Musk’s past partners, who describes the tech mogul as a “nuke”—a force that is efficiently designed yet seemingly uncontrolled and destructive.
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 played a key role in the creation of PayPal, to his current status as a global power broker. Gibney highlights Musk’s evolution from a celebrated figure during the Obama era, praised for his vision of sustainable electric vehicles, to his recent pivot toward political activism, including his vocal support for Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and his subsequent appointment to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).
The film addresses the controversy surrounding Musk’s management of his various enterprises, including Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and X. Critics in the documentary point to his leadership of the Doge unit as a source of increased national debt, citing the mass dismissal of revenue officers and allegations of improper handling of sensitive social security data. Despite these criticisms, the film acknowledges that unlike other failed visionaries, Musk has achieved tangible success with profitable companies and technological breakthroughs, such as reusable rockets.
Personal insights are provided by Musk’s father, Errol, who discusses his son’s formative years in South Africa, and his first wife, Justine Musk. Justine recounts the tragic loss of their infant son to SIDS, expressing deep hurt over Elon’s public grandstanding regarding the child’s death. She also criticizes his later disparaging comments about their transgender daughter, whom he claimed had succumbed to the “woke mind virus.” The film further touches on Musk’s complex personal life, noting his tendency to establish compounds for his extended family.
To illustrate Musk’s persona, Gibney draws a parallel to the 1936 film *The Man Who Could Work Miracles*, comparing the billionaire to an ordinary person granted godlike powers. In a stylistic choice, the documentary employs a photorealistic CG avatar to recite reported quotes from Musk, a decision that serves as a commentary on his deep involvement in artificial intelligence, specifically through GrokAI and its resource-intensive server farms.
Ultimately, the documentary frames Musk as a figure whose potential fall would send significant shockwaves through the corridors of Wall Street, Washington, and Silicon Valley. By placing Musk alongside other high-profile figures who were once hailed as visionaries, Gibney invites viewers to consider the implications of a man who controls the means of production in social media, space exploration, and automotive technology while simultaneously influencing the highest levels of American government. 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 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.