'Musk' Review
Director: Alex Gibney.
Release Date: 10/16/26 [Cinemas]
Genre: Biography. Documentary. History.
MPAA: Rated R.
Distributor: Bleecker Street.
Runtime: 232 minutes.
The Verdict: A Must-See
The powerful man complex has haunted filmmakers in both fiction and non-fiction since the beginning of movies. You can look at Citizen Kane, or even go earlier. While watching Musk, Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour documentary about Elon Musk, I kept thinking about the final scene of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. As Cillian Murphy stares into the abyss, pondering his role in the creation of nuclear weapons and the changes in international warfare, I wondered if Elon Musk has ever had a self-aware moment of guilt or burden like that in his entire life. If you believe Gibney, he probably watches Oppenheimer and only thinks about the potential memes Grok could mock up.
The phrase I’ve been using to describe Musk to interested parties is stylized biography. This isn’t exactly the Ken Burns approach from Gibney, who clearly has opinions about Musk and stacks the box against him with plenty of interviews from tech skeptics, scorned business partners, and more than one former romantic partner. For those who know the story of the world’s richest man, the South African immigrant who turned a little bit of wealth into a lot of wealth and an exorbitant amount of influence, there is little new information here. Gibney organizes the big developments into sections. There’s half an hour on Tesla, half an hour on SpaceX, and much more than half an hour on the purchase of Twitter and its impact on American politics (basically, the entire post-intermission focus is on this). Even if you know the story, it's worth hearing it this way, especially for those who watch this in 20-30 years and won’t remember the full scope of Musk’s present-day sway.
Gibney makes it clear early on that he tried to coerce Musk into participating in this doc, and Musk publicly refused, firing back a foul-mouthed diss on the social media platform he would soon own. Eventually, Gibney found a way to extract some “participation” from Elon: he had his team run diagnostics on every interview or talk Elon has ever given to create a CGI version of the trillionaire. This CG Elon answers questions and responds the way Gibney’s team thinks the real Elon would. It’s a controversial decision, but it works when paired with Musk’s own comments about the nature of civilization and his constant assertions that we’re all living in a simulation.
Gibney extends the simulated-world concept throughout the rest of the production. All the talking-head interviews are shot against a virtual background. Several key moments in Musk’s life, such as the sacking of hundreds of Twitter employees, are recreated in video game-style sequences. The film makes many choices that clearly don't come from a neutral observer; Gibney clearly thinks this is an impossible man to have no opinion on. You get a few testimonials from Tesla diehards trying to separate the tech from the man behind it. “Out of sight, out of mind” is something that is only so possible when you have plenty of interviews on the other side, like attorneys representing innocent victims killed by Tesla’s malfunctioning Autopilot software. It is certainly a film with an agenda, but it is an agenda its director considers righteous.
The doc does a good job of showing how long Musk has been in power. It was startling to see him partner with the Obama administration on SpaceX initiatives, and it speaks to how far his public persona has come. By interrogating his place in the world, Musk makes some interesting, if not revelatory, points about the intoxication of celebrity and power. The film also questions his true level of genius and how much of it is simply showmanship and fraud. It argues that his genius is a bit of a disease, especially in how he views his legacy and in his obsession with procreation. There are plenty of interviews about the destructiveness of his lack of parenting skills, and the damage he’s done to the many children he fathers with multiple women. One pointed dissolve, a picture of Elon fading over a picture of Kublai Khan, says it all effectively but with little subtlety.
The Elon Musk story is far from complete; in fact, developments involving the Commander-in-Chief and Musk are new as of this review’s publication. But it was clearly time for Gibney to put his pencil down; he'd compiled more than enough information and content to make his points clearly, and…not so concisely. This has quickly become the Fall of the “subjective documentary,” and Musk certainly has a thesis statement on what Elon has meant to humanity, and what he can continue to mean as he ages into an ever-evolving world. It makes its concerning case well, and for its length, it moves along at a good clip. Is it the most nuanced portrayal in the world? Don’t ask Grok.
