Filmmaker Alex Gibney spent years crafting a nearly four-hour documentary examining Elon Musk’s rise to wealth and political influence. The film has drawn fierce festival debates, sharp online attacks, and legal threats from Musk’s attorney ahead of its October theatrical release.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney built his career taking on powerful figures, from Enron executives and Elizabeth Holmes to the Church of Scientology and Benjamin Netanyahu. Now, the Oscar-winning filmmaker has turned his lens toward the world’s richest man in a sprawling, nearly four-hour documentary simply titled Musk
. Rather than presenting a straightforward biography, the film sets out to answer how the tech entrepreneur accumulated vast power and why the public handed it to him.
Musk Attorney Threatens Lawsuit Over Election Claims
Ahead of the film’s release, Musk attorney Alex Spiro sent a formal letter dated September 3 to production company Jigsaw Productions warning that litigation was reasonably anticipated. The letter named Gibney, Jigsaw, HBO, Bleecker Street, and Universal. The legal warning focused on a sequence featuring Ashley St.
In the film, St. Clair discusses text messages sent by Musk before the November 2024 presidential election. The texts show Musk stating he felt optimistic about Donald Trump winning because tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix
and mentioning that he planned to tap 'lasers' from space
while owning over 10 thousand lasers in space right now. Spiro's letter argued that the documentary promoted a debunked conspiracy theory insinuating that SpaceX Starlink satellites had uploaded votes for Trump in swing states.
“We don’t claim that he changed votes in the 2024 election. All we do is to show that he was bragging to his lover that he had special access to understanding the outcome of the election in a way that other people didn’t.”
Alex Gibney, via NPR
Musk took to his X platform to slam the project, calling Gibney a bitter old man who lost the plot long ago
and a horrible human
with zero integrity
. He reposted an image of Gibney featuring a poop emoji on his head, prompting Gibney to dryly note that he considered it an improvement. St. Clair dismissed the legal warnings as a joke, asserting that the billionaire’s team was more likely to colonize Mars than win a defamation lawsuit.
Film Incorporates Video Game Sequences
The film incorporates video-game-style sequences.
Documentary Traces Musk from Zip2 to SpaceX
Beneath the digital formatting, the documentary traces Musk’s trajectory from early enterprises like Zip2—sold to Compaq for $307 million in 1999, yielding Musk a $22-million haul that he used to co-found an online financial services company that became PayPal, which was sold to EBay for $1.5 billion. In 2002, Musk used $175 million of his share from that sale to found SpaceX. Former Deputy NASA Administrator Lori Garver championed the fledgling company in the face of government skepticism, though she expresses reservations over Musk’s grandiosity, noting that the air on Mars is toxic and the dirt is made of poison.
Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard claims in the film that he was the brains behind the company’s vehicles, but that Musk engineered his way into pushing him out as CEO to claim the glory. A section of the film examines Tesla's self-driving technology, including a staged 2016 video of its Full-Self Driving system, along with multimillion-dollar payouts after fatal crashes.
Platforms Block Trailers Before Reversing Decisions
Distribution for the documentary faced friction before reaching audiences. On September 26, reporting revealed that TikTok, Meta, and YouTube had all declined paid advertising for the trailer, while X refused to engage entirely. By the following Saturday, platforms had reversed some of those blocks amid public interest. TikTok prohibits the advertising category entirely, while platforms cited election-interference frameworks in their initial denials.