Movie Review
Musk
8/10
TLDR
Alex Gibney’s Musk is four hours long and moves like two. The AI avatar looks like a bobblehead, but the DOGE section hits hard. See it before the midterms.
Where to watch: In theaters October 9 (Bleecker Street)
The Facts
Synopsis: An incisive look behind the legend of Elon Musk, the world’s most heralded “inventor-entrepreneur” who has enormous influence on the world in which we all live.
Director: Alex Gibney
Stars: Elon Musk (archive footage), Errol Musk, Justine Musk, Ashley St. Clair, Kara Swisher, Zoë Schiffer, Martin Eberhard, Geoffrey Hinton
Rated: R
Running Length: 235 minutes
The Thoughts
Elon Musk was calling Alex Gibney‘s film a hit piece long before it was finished. Gibney’s reply on X was the only sensible one: “How would you know?” Now that the Musk documentary is in theaters, the answer is clear. He wouldn’t, and neither will you until you’ve sat through all 235 minutes. That’s a long sit for any subject, but I’ve happily spent twice that long on documentaries about individual horror movies. This one plays like a real-life horror story, and most Americans should see it, especially his most loyal followers.
A Musk Documentary Built Without Its Star
For twenty years, Gibney has been chasing powerful men who build empires on their own legends. The Oscar winner behind Taxi to the Dark Side took on Silicon Valley in Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. Next came The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, about Elizabeth Holmes. Her own new documentary, You Can See Everything, opens a week after this one. Each of those films asks what happens to people who start believing their own press. Here, Gibney frames the “visionary genius” as a 21st-century con man, then spends four hours showing his work.
Musk declined to participate, so Gibney builds the portrait from the people around him and from Musk’s own recorded words. The family side comes from his father, Errol Musk, and his first wife, Justine Musk. Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of his children who later fought him for custody, joins them. On the business side, journalists Kara Swisher and Zoë Schiffer bring years of reporting on his companies. Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard reminds everyone who actually started Tesla, and he has the receipts to prove it. And AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton weighs in on the technology Musk once warned us about and now sells.
The film is split into two halves, before and after Donald Trump‘s second term began, and it moves fast. Credit for that goes to co-writer Michael J. Palmer, who also edited the film. Since he shaped the argument and cut the footage, every scene has a job, and nothing sits around waiting for you.
Meet the Bobblehead in the Gamer Chair
Since Musk obviously wasn’t going to sit for an interview, Gibney built one. His team pulled years of Musk’s podcasts, speeches and interviews into a database and fed them to an animated avatar. It’s an unusual move, even for Gibney. He’s used actors and digital composites to protect sources in past films, but never to voice the man he’s investigating. The gamer chair and cyberpunk lights turn Musk’s pet theory, that we’re all living in a simulation, back on him.
With so much of the film about artificial intelligence, the idea makes sense up to a point. The execution is another story. With a head twice the size of its body and a waxy AI sheen, it looks like a talking bobblehead doll. The lips don’t always match the words, either, though it does nail the way his b’s slide toward v’s.
The film’s video-game sequences work much better. Designed by the studio MakeMake, they turn his DOGE budget cuts into a game he thinks he’s winning. In them, Musk pictures himself as a real-life Tony Stark from Iron Man, swooping in to take back control. Gibney says he shot the story from a low angle, the way Toto saw the wizard in The Wizard of Oz. Toto looked past the floating head to the ordinary man pulling levers behind the curtain. Cinematographer Benjamin Bloodwell keeps the new interviews plain and steady, and that lets the archive footage do the damage.
Then there’s the song. Composer Daniel Pemberton wrote “Let Me Sell You a Dream” with David Byrne, and every lyric comes from Musk’s own mouth. Hearing his sales pitch sung back to him is more damning than any narrator could be.
When the Cuts Stopped Being Numbers
Musk’s shady business dealings and his lack of empathy aren’t news. Neither is his fixation on fathering as many children as possible. He has studied Kublai Khan, and his idea of fatherhood sounds more like building an empire than raising a family. Honestly, I’d watch a separate documentary about the women who keep getting pulled back into his orbit. One married him twice, and others have fought him in court and then still gone back to him! Where the Musk documentary gets truly maddening and absolutely heartbreaking, though, is Washington.
Gibney walks audiences through what happened when Musk and his DOGE boys cut programs with no one checking their work. HIV prevention stopped and Ebola treatment stalled. Food for malnourished children vanished overnight without explanation, and much of it was incinerated instead of handed out. One study in The Lancet projects more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030 from the foreign aid cuts alone.
Even if you’ve kept up with all of this, hearing those numbers again is hard. Harder still is watching staffers whose jobs were cut or frozen describe standing by as the work they signed up for fell apart.
Meanwhile, he got richer and his friends got richer. As Gibney lays out, investigations into his companies went away once the agencies behind them were gutted. The bill landed on farmers, blue-collar workers, small business owners, seniors, veterans, minorities and disabled Americans, who lost insurance, benefits and their health. Running the world like a business will do that to real people.
What Four Hours Still Can't Reach
The hardest part is not talking back to the screen, because the sheer amount of fu*kery on display is staggering. Musk makes promise after promise about what he can do and how he’ll pay for it, and the archive keeps catching him in the gap. His contempt for anyone who slows him down is as plain as his indifference to people who struggle. For all that money, he never looks content, and I ended up feeling sorry for someone so wrapped up in himself. With a tenth of his fortune, I’d shut down this site and spend my days in a pool with my debt-free family.
I do wish Gibney had dug further into Musk’s behavior through people who knew him well and have since drifted away. Musk revealed he has Asperger’s syndrome while hosting Saturday Night Live in 2021, and the film never mentions it. Plenty of people from his past may have signed NDAs, but someone had to be willing to talk. Errol confirms some of that aloofness. Musk’s mother and brother are absent, though, and the only Musk who speaks to us directly is the bobblehead.
Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
The past two years have been a disaster for leadership in this country, and neither side has managed to move forward. There was a time when lawmakers reached across the aisle to make a deal that helped their constituents. Now too many answer to their own agenda, their lobbyists and their seats, and nobody wants to be ousted for compromising. That’s no way to run a government. The people hurting most are low-income and middle-class Americans, the farmers and taxpayers who keep those officials employed.
That’s why the timing matters. Bleecker Street moved the release up a week after the raves out of Venice, even as Musk’s lawyer was sending letters threatening to sue. However it happened, the film lands a month before the midterms.
Talking about men like Musk or Trump is tricky, because their fans hear any criticism as an attack. Gibney’s film makes a simpler point. Power is most tempting to people who never had to work very hard for it, and Musk has spent years convincing us otherwise. Four hours with a con man is a long sit. Living with his cuts will take a lot longer.
The Final
Gibney’s portrait of Elon Musk is long, angry and necessary. The AI avatar misfires and I wanted more voices who knew him, but the DOGE section alone makes this worth four hours before the midterms.
8/10
Where to watch: In theaters October 9 (Bleecker Street)
Reviewed by Joe Botten
Joe Botten is The MN Movie Man, a Twin Cities film critic writing spoiler-free reviews since 2012. He also writes for Loud and Clear Reviews, a Rotten Tomatoes approved site. Find him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
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