Elon Musk called director Alex Gibney a “bitter old man,” a “terrible human being” and someone less deserving of respect than dog feces. He accused the Oscar-winning director, who has covered Scientology, Enron, Lance Armstrong and Elizabeth Holmes in his documentaries, of “zero integrity” and described his films as “boring”. Musk reshared a photo of Gibney with a poop emoji on his head to his hundreds of millions of followers on X. “This is an improvement,” he wrote.
The reason for all this abuse is “Musk,” Gibney’s damning nearly four-hour documentary about the trillionaire; The documentary opened in theaters in Los Angeles and New York on Friday after causing a stir on the festival circuit. But Gibney, 72, doesn’t seem bothered by the barrage as he logs into Zoom from his Brooklyn home in a black hoodie, fresh from a tennis match on Sunday.
“Am I getting a lot of angry tweets from Elon and his friends? Yes, and I’m sure there will be more after the movie is released,” Gibney says.
Still, she admits: “I don’t want him in my head all the time. It’s punishing.” Hence tennis.
“He’s the richest man in the world, but he’s also a stubborn teenager,” Gibney says. “He is both a man of real power and a kind of human meme.”
Elon Musk in Alex Gibney’s documentary “Musk”.
(Alex Brandon/AP)
Drawing on interviews with Musk’s family, former friends and employees, journalists, and business partners (though not Musk himself), Gibney traces the tech entrepreneur’s epic rise and the mythology that grew with him: a real-life Tony Stark who would conquer space and help save humanity. As Musk’s personal life becomes more chaotic and his public behavior more erratic, his power expands from self-driving cars and rockets to his takeover of Twitter and rebranding it as X, artificial intelligence, to the machinery of American democracy with his embrace of President Trump.
In one of the documentary’s most chilling moments, former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair offers a stunning assessment of all this concentrated power: “Elon is a nuclear bomb.”
Musk called the film a hit and a “psychological operation” and portrayed the people featured in it as disgruntled former co-workers with an ax to grind. His lawyer, Alex Spiro, threatened to sue Gibney, accusing the film of falsely implying that Musk was using Starlink to influence the 2024 election, and claimed his team was rebuffed when he tried to provide information during fact-checking. Gibney’s production company, Jigsaw Productions, argued that the film was a factual examination of a powerful public figure protected by the 1st Amendment.
Gibney doubts Musk even watched the movie.
“Actually, I don’t expect a lawsuit to be filed, but if it is, so be it,” he says. “The discovery should be interesting.”
Gibney initially came to the project as a Musk skeptic. When she first started working on “Musk” four years ago, she had Tesla solar panels in her home and was fascinated not only by Musk’s clean energy initiatives but also by what she called his “bumbling charisma” and the way he interacted with ordinary people online.
The filmmaker’s first move was to try to talk to Musk himself. He had the cell phone number and email address of producer Jessie Deeter, who had previously worked with Musk, and tried repeatedly to persuade her to join. Gibney says Musk’s only response was a public post about X calling him “immoral.”
“I took that as a no,” he says dryly.
When Musk did not want to be interviewed, Gibney and his team found a solution. Inspired by Musk’s fascination with the idea that reality itself might be a simulation, the filmmakers created a CG avatar of his likeness, realistically rendered but clearly artificial, wearing a black leather jacket and sitting in a gaming chair. The avatar recurs throughout the film, speaking lines taken from Musk’s interviews and public appearances.
“I think Elon should be happy with the presentation,” Gibney says. “I want my main character to look good.”
Musk wasn’t the only one reluctant to talk. Gibney says even potential sources worth hundreds of millions of dollars are afraid of being sued; This, he notes, is an irony, given Musk describes himself as a “free speech absolutist.” As Musk moved further to the right, Gibney says, others became more willing to speak out.
Among those who agreed to speak was Musk’s first wife, Justine, who they met while they were students at Queen’s University in Canada. He told Gibney he was impressed by Musk’s almost supernatural confidence; The feeling that everything he said he would do would somehow come true.
“What Justine said really resonated with me as I thought of him as a ‘confidence man’ in all the senses of that term,” Gibney says.
Meanwhile, Musk continued to outshine the movie with his controversial behavior.
By spring 2024, the two-hour cut Gibney had hoped to bring to fall festivals was nearly complete. But after Trump survived an assassination attempt and Musk backed him, executives at HBO, which had already acquired TV and streaming rights to the film, urged Gibney to move on. “They said, ‘You’re not done. You’ve got to keep following the story and follow it wherever it leads,'” Gibney says. “That’s what I did.” The film eventually grew to six hours before Gibney started to cut it back.
The film leaves some topics only partially explored throughout its entire length. One of these is Musk’s reported drug use. In 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported that he had used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. Musk, who said he took prescription ketamine for depression, denied this, claiming that years of random drug tests had not found “even trace amounts” of drugs or alcohol.
“I went as far on the record as I felt I could go,” Gibney says, adding that he sees drugs as just one part of a “pretty toxic dish,” along with Musk’s childhood trauma, his use of Twitter, and the destabilizing effect of so much power.
And “Musk” zooms by as he demonstrates his subject’s much-discussed arm-stretching gesture — widely condemned as a Nazi salute — at the 2025 Trump inauguration. Given how closely the film examines Musk’s ties to the far right, why not examine this case further?
Gibney answers without much hesitation. “I think this is a classic Elon moment,” he says. “On the one hand, you can say, ‘Wow, this is clearly a reference to the far right.’ Or is he tricking us all? Is it just LOL? Is this a meme? It’s hard to know.”
Gibney says Musk’s increasingly right-wing policies are clear, but he’s less sure what beliefs actually support them. He points out Musk’s claim that all socialists are Nazis because Nazis are called National Socialists. “This is the stupidest thing ever; just trolling,” Gibney says. “I think the most dangerous thing about Elon is that he no longer has a coherent philosophy.”
“I think he needs to be loved deeply,” Gibney continues. “Part of this is surrounding yourself with ‘yes’ voters (in this case, an increasingly hard-line right-wing group) and excluding and hating those who are not part of that group.”
Gibney says digging into the incident would mean “playing Elon’s game,” trying to “put the pieces together like a conspiracy theorist would to make sense of the chaos.” When asked about his own reading, he says: “I think he wanted to read it both ways.”
Elon Musk is in the White House in 2025 while he is an advisor to President Trump.
(Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Some of the film’s most provocative material concerns the 2024 election. St. Clair shares private texts from before the election in which Musk cryptically mentions “an anomaly in the matrix” and “10,000 lasers in space,” which he believes are a reference to SpaceX’s satellite internet network, Starlink. On election night, Musk appears to know unusually early that Trump has won, telling him, “We have the best real-time data.”
Gibney says he doesn’t believe Musk manipulated votes, but the ranking leaves open what, if anything, lies behind his initial apparent certainty. Later in the film, Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton warns that government data collected by Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency could be used with artificial intelligence to interfere in future elections.
Gibney admits he doesn’t know what Musk means. “He may just be a bull, have a lover and want to impress her,” he says. “But if I were to risk a guess — and it’s just a guess — one of the things he might be thinking about in the 2026 midterms is to cast doubt on outcomes that could go the wrong way for him.”
The election sequence raises the question of whether the film risks encouraging the same kind of conspiratorial thinking in Musk that he finds troubling.
“I don’t knowingly go to the place where I say, ‘This is exactly what happened,’” Gibney claims. “I am putting forward a model of truth that I think should concern us.”
For all the apocalyptic overtones in the film, Gibney doesn’t want viewers to feel hopeless.
“It’s a very dark comedy that ends up being a horror movie,” he says. “What I want them to take away is that we need to find a way to hold this man accountable, to take back some of the power we gave him.”
The problem with finishing a movie about Elon Musk, of course, is that Elon Musk keeps going on. Last week, the Pentagon announced that Musk would lead a new project examining the future of war.
“I find this appalling,” Gibney says. “It’s like putting the Joker in charge of the Manhattan Project.” He suspects the arrangement amounts to a rescue of xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company and maker of the Grok chatbot. “Elon is exceptionally good at hacking bounties from the government.”
After four years, does Musk know what he ultimately wants? “I don’t think so HE “He knows,” Gibney says. “And I think that’s the scariest thing.”
Musk is only 55 years old. As tired as Gibney is about the subject, he can’t completely rule out “Musk 2.”
“This isn’t a sequel I’m looking forward to,” he says. “But if called, I will serve.”
Meanwhile, after the PR efforts for “Musk” are over, he has one last thing to do regarding Musk: He plans to cancel account X.