Reviews for Musk are out, and they commend the documentary’s investigation into Elon Musk as much as they slam the billionaire tech mogul himself.
Alex Gibney’s latest documentary, which depicts “the world’s richest man as petty, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, cruel,” and “detached from humans at a personal level,” follows the SpaceX founder through his chaotic career, exposing his downward spiral from eager Silicon Valley nerd to corrupt MAGA power player.
The film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on Sept. 8 and hits U.S. theaters on Oct. 16. Gibney’s 2008 film, Taxi to the Dark Side, won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
Musk depicts its central character’s descent into villainy by highlighting aspects of both his personal and his professional life he’d attempted to obscure.
One significant theme is Musk’s heedless launch and rollout of Tesla’s Autopilot driver-assist system in 2015, technology responsible for killing scores of drivers. Tesla’s marketing strategy involved “ads that exaggerated the car’s powers,” according to Variety’s review, leading to widespread misinformation.
“People were suckered,” the review explains. “From the outset, there were accidents. More than 60 fatalities have been linked to Tesla’s driver-assistance systems. Talk about something that could put a dent in your image! But Musk, for the most part, succeeded in hushing up the lawsuits, the federal investigations, and the fatal crashes, which were evidence of a recklessness that should have given the whole world pause.”
“Once you start piecing together Musk’s scandals and cut corners and slipshod management,” it continues, “you see that he’s a creator of mirages who promises more than he delivers.”
The documentary also argues that Musk’s purported championing of free speech was actually a calculated power grab.
His supposed advocacy for the First Amendment was “his ticket into the White House, only to weaponize it,” an IndieWire review says, adding that he took over X to “twist users either slavishly into his favor, or inure them to bottomless scrolls of hate speech and Grok-generated child porn.”
While delving into Musk’s personal life, Gibney peels away layers of Musk’s careful PR and NDAs to pinpoint his beliefs about family and marriage (Musk has 14 children with four different women).
“He believes his progeny to be part of a larger war against population decline,” the Variety review states, adding that Musk “would zero in on young women he thought would make good ‘breeders’ and get them pregnant, dropping all interest in them after the babies were born. (They were required to sign NDAs.)”
Because Musk refused involvement in the film, Gibney employs an “AI Elon” interviewee who speaks with Musk’s verbatim quotes and kills government workers as the unhinged DOGE director “as if in a first-person-shooter video game.”
“This digital avatar is waxy, glazed and disconcerting,” The Telegraph writes. “In other words, the likeness is uncanny.”
The documentary’s overarching narrative erodes Musk’s bizarre public persona and reveals the alarming scope of his influence, from his early days in front of a big, boxy computer to his perpetual “will they/won’t they” status with Trump.
The film highlights Musk’s ideas that “tech fascism doesn’t need to be a form of government; it can do an end run around government to control people’s lives by reducing them to cogs,” Variety writes. “That, Musk argues, is the world Elon Musk has been building up to, not intentionally at first, but once he got a taste of power. The film says that what should scare us about him is how he coddles his own interests by passing them off as the world’s.”
