Despite its length, Gibney’s film is surprisingly compelling. Based on mountains of research into Musk’s life and career, it features in-depth interviews with many people who have been close to him over the years, including his ex-wife Justine Musk; the social media influencer Ashley St. Clair, with whom Elon has a son; and his father, Errol Musk.
The documentary is a deeply unflattering portrait of one of the world’s most consequential actors. Among other claims, it alleges that Tesla has fudged key data on its cars, like battery mileage, and exaggerated the capabilities of their full self-driving mode with potentially deadly results, allegations the company has disputed. Despite his railing against government spending and inefficiency, the documentary argues Musk has himself benefited tremendously from government investment, often through a process Gibney likens to “reward hacking,” a term from the AI space describing artificial intelligence agents’ tendency to find loopholes in their prompts that deliver results that score well but don’t actually achieve the user’s intended goal.
And on the personal side, there are also Musk’s many children, had with many women, some of whom involved contractual arrangements with NDAs, attested to by St. Later in the doc, Gibney details the alleged harmful effects of Musk and DOGE administering the Trump administration’s massive cuts to USAID, which has reportedly led to severe deprivation and deaths among impoverished communities around the world. In June, Musk posted on X that nobody can “cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died.
Not a single name!” And all that is before getting into Musk’s embrace of ultra-national right-wing movements around the world. Not having access to Musk himself, Gibney and his team opted for a technological workaround, gathering as much audio as they could find of Musk talking, and then creating an extremely uncanny animated avatar of him to speak directly to the audience. It’s a bold choice, and one that Gibney uses to great effect, alongside sequences with video game-style graphics, to plunge the audience into a reality inspired by Musk’s musings about the possibility that our world is a simulation.
The end result is an entertaining, often very funny, but ultimately extremely disturbing study of the corrupting influence of money and power in American society and politics. Before the movie’s North American premiere, Gibney spoke to GQ about the film, and what we’re really talking about when we talk about Elon. GQ: I think it’s easy to look at Musk from one angle and see an embodiment of the Great Man Theory—the idea that one unique individual with certain qualities can have a profound historical impact.
How do you feel about that idea? Alex Gibney: Well, I don't discount the great man theory of history. Powerful individuals can have enormous impact.
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