The expansive film charts Elon Musk’s rise to become the world’s richest person while sharply criticizing his expanding political influence and corporate power.
Gibney started the project before Donald Trump’s second presidential term and expanded its scope after Musk became a close aide to the president, extending the runtime from two hours to nearly four hours.
The documentary spans from Musk’s early Silicon Valley days—including co-founding Zip2 in 1995 and purchasing a $1 million McLaren—through his leadership at Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter, all the way to his ascent as the world’s first trillionaire and his role in the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Gibney’s Character Study and the Comparison to Enron
Gibney, whose past documentary subjects include the collapse of energy firm Enron and Scientology, explained that he views Musk’s trajectory through the lens of historical corporate fraud rather than groundbreaking innovation. In a news conference at the Venice Film Festival earlier in September, Gibney noted that the story of Musk turned out to be really the story of an old wine in a new bottle.
“What I discovered was that the story of Musk was not a new tech story. His story turns out to be the story of the confidence man, the stock pumper. His wealth and power comes from inflated stock, and so I had told that story before with Enron and with Elizabeth Holmes, and so it was a story that was oddly familiar to me.”
Alex Gibney, filmmaker, via Yahoo
The documentary also explores personal aspects of Musk’s life, featuring interviews with his father, Errol Musk, former Tesla CEO Martin Eberhard, and Ashley St. Clair, Musk’s former partner and the mother of one of his children. Justine Musk, Musk’s first wife with whom he had six children, shares in the film that she learned the term “gaslighting” through their relationship.
A Teaser Trailer Praises and Condemns the Billionaire
A 49-second teaser trailer released on YouTube highlights the starkly polarized views surrounding the Tesla owner. The clip shifts rapidly in tone, featuring voices calling the 55-year-old Musk “possibly the greatest living inventor” and the real-life Iron Man,
while other speakers describe him as chaotic, capricious, and a fascist.
The teaser concludes with an image of a spacecraft falling to the ground and exploding in flames, accompanied by a voice declaring, Elon is a nuke.
Simulation Theory, AI Avatars, and Legal Pushback from Musk
Because Musk did not respond to Gibney’s request for an interview, the documentary utilizes an inventive work-around. The film opens by discussing simulation theory, drawing on Musk’s public fascination with video games from Pong to modern massive multiplayer online role-playing games. Gibney fed AI a database of every public statement Musk has ever made to generate an uncanny, animated digital avatar that speaks in Musk’s voice from a futuristic room.
The movie also incorporates video game motifs, transforming sequences where Musk cuts federal government spending through DOGE into a first-person shooter game where an animated Musk yields a chainsaw.
Musk has strongly pushed back against the project on his social media platform X, labeling the film a false film,
calling Gibney a douche,
and tweeting that Gibney “has ZERO integrity. Horrible human.” Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, sent Jigsaw Productions a letter threatening a defamation suit regarding a text exchange featured in the film between Musk and Ashley St. Clair.
Gibney countered that the production team rigorously fact-checked the documentary and subjected it to thorough legal review. The film includes a 10-minute intermission during its three-hour-and-forty-five-minute runtime and is scheduled to open in theaters on October 16, following its international debut in Venice and North American screening in Toronto.
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