VENICE, Italy (AP) — Elon Musk has called filmmaker Alex Gibney a lot of names leading up to the theatrical release of the documentary “Musk,” which is playing in select theaters in New York and Los Angeles and expands nationwide on Friday.
Over the past few weeks, Musk has posted on X that Gibney is an “idiot,” a “horrible human,” a “shill for the far left,” and a “tinfoil hat crackpot” with “zero credibility.” When the documentary was announced three
years ago, he called it a “hit piece.”
After its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last month, Musk wrote that dog feces are “worth more respect than Gibney.” The trillionaire has reportedly not yet seen the film and did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.
The documentary is facing more than a war of words from Musk, however. The film's distributor, Bleecker Street, has not been able to run paid advertisements on several major social media platforms. As of Sept. 25, YouTube, Meta, TikTok and X had all refused. YouTube, where the trailer had been available through regular channels, and Meta have since reversed course, saying that it had been flagged for “political content.”
There are also concerns about whether “Musk” will eventually land on HBO as originally planned in the aftermath of the Skydance merger, the new entertainment giant created by Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. CEO David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, is friendly with Musk.
“Would Musk be able to call Larry or David and say, you know, don’t put this doc on? Yeah,” Gibney said in an interview with the AP. “We live in that world now, particularly a world that’s become so transactional in the political realm … it’s literally pay to play.”
There have been threats of lawsuits from Musk's camp as well. But Gibney is also leaning into it, posting regularly on X from his own account and through a newly created one called @muskfilmfacts, which is actively dispelling false narratives and highlighting suspicions of suppressed content. Recently, Gibney wrote on X that his film is “about a ‘free-speech absolutist’ who has threatened a lawsuit to try to stop the film from being seen.”
The Oscar-winner learned from making his Scientology documentary “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief” that the best way to fight back is to “not let them get inside your head.”
“We also have a lawyer who’s really, really good,” he said. “Because, of course, we vet this stuff very carefully.”
Gibney spent nearly four years making the film, a sweeping portrait of the power and influence of the world’s richest man, charting his rise from his early days in Silicon Valley through SpaceX, Tesla and DOGE, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency that overhauled the federal workforce last year.
It runs nearly four hours and features on-camera interviews with Musk’s family, including his father Errol Musk, his first wife and another mother of one of his children, as well as journalists, business associates, former friends, colleagues and government officials.
The project became a “runaway story,” said Gibney, who was finalizing a two-hour cut when Musk endorsed Donald Trump following the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. HBO leadership encouraged Gibney to keep going.
“I started out doing the film because it was about 21st century power,” Gibney said. “I didn’t have a sense at that time that he was literally going to accrete the power of a kind of shadow president. … But that’s what he did, so we had to follow that story where it went.”
Musk did not sit for an interview, so Gibney and his team did something a little unconventional: They made a computer-generated Musk that speaks directly to the camera. The image might be a visual effect, both flattering and a bit uncanny, but the voice and the words it says are all Musk's own, taken directly from recordings of things he’s said in interviews and at public appearances. Gibney's team used artificial intelligence to help sync the words to his mouth.
One of the sticking points for Musk and his supporters that has emerged since the film started screening for press and festival audiences has to do with “space lasers” and the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The source is a text exchange between Musk and Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk's children who provided the messages. Musk writes to her about feeling optimistic about Trump’s chances, and how he has “10,000 lasers in space right now.”
Its inclusion in the documentary has provided ammunition for Musk supporters and his lawyers to discredit the film, pointing to an unfounded conspiracy theory about SpaceX’s Starlink satellites interfering in the election. But neither the film, nor St. Clair, make that claim. It simply presents his text messages and lets the audience decide what to make of it.
St. Clair also provides an audio recording of Musk associate Jared Birchall trying to negotiate an NDA with her, on which parental support would be contingent, after she gave birth to their child. She said she turned down some $40 million to maintain her right to speak freely.
With attentions fractured in modern life, Gibney hopes there is some benefit in synthesizing information into a narrative. He’s also quick to credit the journalists whose work they draw upon.
The runtime might be longer than your average movie, but it’s an engaging watch. For the first 45 minutes, he said, “you’re kind of rooting for Elon.”
“He’s trying to get those rockets up in the air. Fails three times. He’s got that critical fourth launch, and you see those incredible images of the reusable rockets. It’s Elon at his best,” he said. “But then you have to ask the question, what happened?”
There is also a six-hour version, Gibney said. But they edited it down to stick to the most pressing information, including questions about the data gathered on U.S. citizens during Musk's DOGE tenure.
“I hope that people will look at some of the stuff that we present in the film and then take it further,” he said. “You know, should there be an investigation in Congress about the data and what happened to the data? And is it sitting in a hard drive in SpaceX or Tesla?”
As for who he thinks the audience might be, he hopes that it’s not just Musk skeptics.
“If you’re in a cult and you assume that he’s your supreme leader, then maybe just like the folks in Scientology, you’ll criticize the film and you won’t see it,” Gibney said. “But if you’re intrigued by the guy, and even if you have some affection and admiration for his accomplishments, I would hope you go see it.”
