Bleecker Street shared a teaser trailer for filmmaker Alex Gibney’s highly-anticipated documentary Musk, which centers on the world’s richest man. The trailer features footage of Elon Musk’s rockets launching into space and then crashing as people describe
him in mostly unflattering terms.
“He’s chaotic, random, capricious,” one voice says. “He is manifestly cruel and selfish,” another adds. “In a science fiction novel, he would not be a hero,” one concludes. Someone else describes him as “a man who has lost his mind.”
A synopsis describes the four-hour film as “an incisive look behind the legend of Elon Musk, the wealthiest, and most unchecked, man on the planet.”
Gibney has been working on the film for several years. In 2024, he told Deadline he was interested in Musk because he’s “a larger-than-life figure.”
“People have their opinions about him, but I think the challenge… is to bring something that people don’t expect to find, something in the material that’s hiding, some stuff that’s hiding in plain sight, which is what I’d say we are finding that I think will be surprising for folks,” Gibney said. “And it’s not just like, is it Elon thumbs up or Elon thumbs down? I’m not really interested in that kind of formula, douche or not. But it’s more like, what do we really think about how he operates?”
Gibney discussed the film with AP earlier this week, saying that none of his previous films compared to the story of Musk in terms of the scope of someone’s power.
“What’s interesting about Musk is it’s not so much something that’s new as an old wine in a new bottle,” he said, “And Musk, I think like some of the characters that I’ve followed in the past, is afflicted with what some people call noble cause corruption. That is to say, you begin to believe in a cause. And in Musk’s case, it was making us multi-planetary and also leading us into a more sustainable environmental world. And because you’re in line with those important, valuable, good causes, anything you do in the service of those causes is OK. And ultimately that leads you to corruption.”
He added, “In a way, Musk is not dissimilar from the guys at Enron. He’s not dissimilar from Elizabeth Holmes in the way that he bent the truth to serve his impulses.”
Musk premieres at the Venice Film Festival today. Bleecker Street will release it in theaters on Oct. 16 before HBO airs the doc later this year.
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