Filmmaker Alex Gibney debuted his nearly four-hour documentary Musk at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, framing the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive as a dangerous global political operator pursuing influence across right-wing administrations worldwide.
The documentary, simply titled Musk, world-premiering in the Italian festival’s Venice Open – Out of Competition program, comes from producers Jigsaw Productions (Gibney, Jessie Deeter, Erin Edeiken), Closer Media (Zhang Xin), Anonymous Content (Nick Shumaker, Jessica Grimshaw) and Double Agent (Dana O’Keefe). With a runtime of 225 minutes, the film is a portrait of the world’s most heralded ‘inventorentrepreneur’ who exerts an enormous influence on the world in which we all live. Despite its 225-minute running time, the Venice synopsis of the doc is brief and to the point: An incisive look behind the legend of Elon Musk, the world’s most heralded ‘inventorentrepreneur’ who exerts an enormous influence on the world in which we all live.
Alex Gibney Details the Evolution of the Venice Documentary
Director Alex Gibney told reporters at a Venice press conference around lunchtime that he started off as a kind of admirer and hoped that Musk might sit down for an interview. Gibney shared how the doc team reached out to Musk for the film, without success, and how the focus of the project changed once the tech mogul got wrapped into Donald Trump
and his story. Ultimately, he didn’t want to talk to me, Gibney said. Then you start digging into the facts and you follow them where they lead. And where they led for me was to a place that upended the myth, I would say, of Elon Musk as a kind of modern Leonardo da Vinci.
The result is a mix of the reality of what he has done and the unreality of his narrative,
the filmmaker said. “In the service of that, we created this formulation that came out of Musk’s own ideas about the notion that we’re living in a simulation or in some kind of existential video game, to convey in formal terms, through a kind of avatar, which speaks with Musk’s actual words, and video game imagery” both sides, the reality and the unreality.
Alex Gibney, Filmmaker
When questioned by journalists regarding potential legal retaliation, a member of the press asked if Gibney is concerned about a potential legal backlash by Musk. We consulted our lawyers, and they gave us a sign-off to go forward,
when the doc team decided to use Musk’s words and visualize the mogul as an avatar, he replied. Beyond legal considerations, the production team encountered substantial resistance during research. Asked if there has been any retaliation against the filmmakers, the director shared that he encountered a tremendous sense of fear of talking, really almost existential fear,
among many of the people that the film team reached out to.
Global Right-Wing Alliances and the Crony Capitalist Agenda
A couple of questions focused on the tech mogul’s support for political parties on the right flank of the political spectrum in such countries as Germany, where the far-right AfD just won a regional election in Saxony-Anhalt this weekend. In fact, Musk congratulated the party on the victory via a “Well done!” on his X. Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s lead candidate in the region, thanked the billionaire in return, posting: Thank you, @elonmusk, for your support and for your clear and highly important perspective on the political developments of our time — including here in Germany.
So, how dangerous is Musk, especially for the future of democracy? “Extremely,” Gibney concluded. Very dangerous.
The film about the owner of X and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is expected in North American theaters in October.
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