Once you start lining up Musk’s scandals and cut corners, you see that he’s a creator of mirages who promises more than he delivers. When a subject has been as exhaustively covered — and as infamous — as Elon Musk, the electric-car-entrepreneur-turned-rocket-man-turned-richest-billionaire-in-the-universe-turned-Twitter-disruptor-turned-DOGE-destroyer-turned-God-only-knows-what-he’ll-do-next, reviews of a documentary about him tend to lead by plucking out the film’s incendiary bits of investigative reportage, the ones that feel worthy of a news headline. The biggest revelation, to me, was the film’s detailed history of Musk’s attempt to put a self-driving car on the market — a technology that’s sure to be here at some point, though Musk, in his race to be first, was far too eager to announce that it had already happened.
Tesla released its Autopilot driver-assist system in 2015 (and then the Full Self-Driving Beta program in 2020), marketing the new technology with ads that exaggerated the car’s powers. And so people were suckered. From the outset, there were accidents.
More than 60 fatalities have been linked to Tesla’s driver-assistance systems. Talk about something that could put a dent in your image! But Musk, for the most part, succeeded in hushing up the lawsuits, the federal investigations, and the fatal crashes, which were evidence of a recklessness that should have given the whole world pause.
There are other places where Gibney colors in sides of Elon Musk you knew in a cursory way. It’s well-known that Musk has fathered many children — at least 14, though the people around him say it’s many more. He believes his progeny to be part of a larger war against population decline.
The documentary, which features a highly illuminating interview with his ex Ashley St. Clair, goes into the details of how Musk, apart from his two spouses, would zero in on young women he thought would make good “breeders” and get them pregnant, dropping all interest in them after the babies were born. (They were required to sign NDAs.) The film also goes into details of his alleged drug use (ketamine, Ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms). Yet what makes “Musk” such a lacerating and important watch, grounded in Alex Gibney’s supremely insightful but user-friendly mastery of the documentary form, is that it takes this flamboyant and in many ways elusive figure, with his tech ambitions and cosmic dreams and malignant megalomania, and puts him all together, letting us see how one chapter of his life led to the next, and how the Musk dream wasn’t always so grandiose.
You can see it evolve right along with his look. In the mid-’90s, at his first company, the relatively modest Zip2 (which essentially put the yellow pages onto the Internet), he looks just like the tech geek he was inside, skinny and unthreatening, with receding hair and a rabbity grin. But it’s not long before his Ayn Rand ambitions start to poke through.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
