Director Alex Gibney said his documentary, Musk, is about the blurring line between reality and unreality, and it seemed important to him to represent that cinematically.Scott A Garfitt/The Canadian Press
About three hours into Musk, Alex Gibney’s exhaustive (nearly four hours long!) new documentary about Elon Musk, you realize you’re watching a horror movie.
Gibney painstakingly builds a case that the richest man on Earth – ever – controls a popular disinformation network (X); the satellites that provide global internet, which he turns off and on at will (Starlink); the AI used by the U.S. military (Grok); whatever data about the U.S. citizenry (and who knows what else, or where it’s stored) he was able to mine as head of Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE); a program capable of weaponizing outer space (SpaceX); enough money to influence any election in any country; and – most importantly – has a character containing almost 100 per cent self-interest and almost zero per cent empathy.
Moreover, Gibney’s film demonstrates, Musk built much of that empire through a series of escalating cons. As one talking head says, decrying that it’s too late now to rein in Musk’s power and influence, “Oops.”
Gibney, 72, has made a career exposing criminals and con jobs in films and series including The Crime of the Century (about Big Pharma’s opioid push), The Inventor (Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes), Going Clear (Scientology) and Enron (corporate corruption). In person, he has a level voice, a calm but thorough demeanor, and an ear for irony; all these traits show up in his work.
We met in September during the Toronto International Film Festival, ahead of the film’s Canadian release on Oct. 16. He wore a gently rumpled white jacket and black sneakers, and munched on popcorn exfiltrated from a movie theatre. Here are highlights from our conversation.
A still from Alex Gibney's documentary film, Musk.TIFF/The Canadian Press
When did you realize you were making a horror movie?
We started in 2022 to make a two-hour film, a business story about how Musk had inflated his own value. After Trump was shot in 2024, we were watching Elon’s influence grow in real time. In the stories that interest me, there are always hinge moments of moral transgression. With Enron, it was when we got audio tapes of Enron traders taking down the California electrical grid. In The Inventor, it was when Holmes went live in Walgreens with a blood-testing machine that put people’s lives at risk. For Musk, it was the many people who died in his self-driving cars, whose lawsuits he settled.
You build evidence of Musk’s falsehoods: a battery swap that’s completely faked; the staged “Paint it Black” promotional video that exaggerated Tesla’s self-driving capabilities; the fact that Teslas are programmed to inflate their battery range. Why isn’t he in jail?
That’s a good question. Throughout his career, he’s eluded that reckoning. He was about to get it – 11 U.S. departments of government had launched 32 investigations into him, including fraud – and that’s why he threw himself behind Trump. I thought I was prepared, but I was vastly unprepared, for the magnitude of the carnage that was DOGE. They went in to destroy the U.S. federal government, and they did a pretty good job. Because of Musk’s attacks on USAID, NIH and CDC, millions will die.
Trump’s federal government won’t conduct investigations. Individual states might, and journalists are. But why doesn’t the public seem to care?
I’m flummoxed by that. But the genius of the destruction that was DOGE was that people have spent the last 50 years denigrating the federal government. It was the swamp – the problem, not the solution. So people were behind rooting out waste, fraud and abuse, without understanding the real agenda: gaining access to the IT systems.
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Your film depicts the massive firings at Twitter and DOGE as first-person shooter video games. Were you concerned that would undermine its seriousness?
Elon is obsessed with video games and simulations. He’s said that mowing down demons in video games “calms the demons in my mind.” Representing what he did as a shooter game underlines both how performative the cruelty was, and also the reckless damage being done in plain sight, and gleefully. I felt the satire was earned, based on who he is.
You also create a Musk avatar, who utters actual Musk quotes.
Elon didn’t agree to be interviewed. We reached out to him early, and we tried a number of times. So how, cinematically, do I represent his point of view? I chose real sound bites to be his rebuttals to what I or other people are saying.
Still, the last thing you want is to give viewers a reason to dismiss what you’re saying.
I guess so. But I’ve been criticized for my cinematic choices before. In Client 9, I hired an actress to perform the actual words from audiotaped interviews with the key escort who helped take Eliot Spitzer down, because she didn’t want to go on camera. In Zero Days I created a composite character for the people I interviewed at the NSA [National Security Agency] so they wouldn’t be recognized. Musk is about the blurring line between reality and unreality. It seemed important to represent that cinematically.
You don’t spend much time psychologizing Musk’s childhood.
I suggest some possibilities of demons in his past that may be afflicting him in the present. Clearly there was violence in Elon’s childhood.
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Do you think Musk and Trump ever talk about their fathers?
No. I’m sure not. All of us recognize that maybe they should get therapy. But that’s not something they think about. They see the character flaws they developed from troubled childhoods as being a feature, not a bug. It allows them to be tough and cruel.
Part of what makes this a horror film is the idea of con men and billionaires running the world, when they are ...
... Consequence free. Yes. That’s the jaw-dropper, really. Musk wants his story to be, “He’s the tech Leonardo da Vinci.” When instead it’s the story of someone who learned how to work the levers of money and power, how to exploit a flawed system, in ways we hadn’t anticipated. Trump and Musk have evolved to live in the swamp. They are its apex predators. I also thought a lot about The Wizard of Oz making this film. Because the other illusion we’re currently under is that anyone who’s rich is a genius and they should run our lives. As if being rich is evidence of innate genius, rather than evidence of innate ruthlessness.
How do you answer people who accuse your work of not being objective?
My documentary hero, Marcel Ophuls, used to say, “I always have a point of view. The trick is to show how hard it is to come to that point of view.” So I put in countervailing points of view, and I make sure the film is factually accurate. But the physicist Richard Feynman is credited with a good line about this, too: “Keep an open mind – but not so open that your brain falls out.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.