Maybe Alex Gibney Did Elon Musk a Favor
· The Atlantic
Watching Musk can feel a bit like staring into the sun—uncomfortable and unpleasant, given that the new documentary is almost four hours long and is filled with distressing footage of the richest man in the world. Despite Elon Musk being a near-permanent fixture in the headlines, the film pushes viewers to pay even closer attention to him, arguing that Musk’s motivations for amassing so much power are as important to scrutinize as how he did so. Maybe the mogul truly seeks to establish a future in which people walk on Mars. Or maybe, the director Alex Gibney posits, Musk has built his influence over millions of electric-vehicle customers, social-media users, and Donald Trump supporters so that he can shape this world as he sees fit.
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Musk, unsurprisingly, isn’t pleased with the film. In a series of posts on X, Musk called the project a “hit piece” and Gibney a “horrible human.” In a letter to Gibney’s company, Jigsaw Productions, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro threatened to file a defamation lawsuit. Spiro took issue in particular with the documentary’s suggestion that Musk may be able to use the Starlink satellites owned by his rocket company, SpaceX, to influence elections. (Jigsaw said in a statement that the First Amendment protects its “right to engage in open debate and fact-based examinations of powerful public figures.”)
When we spoke ahead of Musk’s North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, Gibney didn’t sound fazed. The Oscar-winning documentarian has dealt with intimidating legal battles before; for his 2015 film Going Clear, which examined the notoriously litigious Church of Scientology, an HBO executive at the time joked that the network had hired some 160 lawyers to withstand the organization’s potential response. For Musk, Gibney recruited independent fact-checkers to audit his team’s research, stress-testing the material presented on-screen more thoroughly than anything else in his filmography. “It’s never good for the lawyer for the richest man in the world to threaten to sue you,” Gibney told me. “But we’ve prepared for it by being really rigorous and being true to the facts.”
[Read: Elon Musk is playing God]
Still, the troubles surrounding Musk have only grown. Shortly after I spoke with Gibney, The Hollywood Reporter detailed the possibility that the film would not be distributed abroad after its theatrical U.S. debut, on October 9. Universal, the studio handling the documentary’s international rights, reportedly considered the project “politically sensitive for parts of the Trump administration” and contemplated not distributing it at all. (Per Variety, however, Musk will be released abroad as planned; though the publication cited “sources familiar with the project,” Universal did not comment on the rollout.) If the film fails to secure a release beyond its North American date, the move would be in line with how Gibney described Musk’s ethos to me. “He has gone to enormous lengths and expense, including buying the presidency of the United States, in order to be able to manufacture a narrative that suits him,” Gibney said of the businessman. “He doesn’t like it when that narrative is upended.”
Musk refused to be interviewed for Gibney’s documentary, but the director had a plan in mind. In previous documentaries such as Client 9, about the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal, and Zero Days, a dive into the computer virus Stuxnet, the filmmaker deployed actors as stand-ins for subjects who couldn’t appear on camera. For the former, he sought to protect a vulnerable source’s privacy; for the latter, the NSA whistleblowers he spoke with would have been prosecuted for their participation. But as Gibney and his team sifted through footage of Musk’s previous interviews, they decided to go further: They turned him into a digital creation, inspired by how often he spoke about reality being a simulation. “We thought, Well, fuck it, let’s do that with Elon,” he recalled. Using AI tools to help sync the fake Musk’s facial movements with the real Musk’s voice, Gibney sought to underline the “contradictions of the technology itself.”
The decision has led to some confusion. Halfway through my screening of Musk, during the intermission, a publicist for the film clarified that the digital representation of Musk that recited things the real Musk had said wasn’t AI-generated, as some reviews of the film following its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival had claimed. He’s computer-generated, the publicist said, and therefore created by humans.
In those critics’ defense, it’s hard to tell. Visually, the animated Musk—dubbed the “Avatar” by Gibney and the designers at the visual-effects studio MakeMake—exists in the uncanny valley of video-game characters and AI-generated deepfakes. His eyes, staring directly into the camera, look soulless. His movements are strangely fluid. He’s more chiseled than the real Musk—“I think I did him a favor,” Gibney said—and he appears to be seated inside a spaceship. To the director, the more jarring the Avatar looked amid an otherwise-serious film, the better. “I’m playing in Elon’s sandbox,” Gibney said, citing Musk’s penchant for posting eye-searing memes. “I mean, this is a guy who traffics in poop emojis online.”
Speaking Musk’s language, though, might not protect the film from more of his ire. Gibney said that he’s concerned about whether Musk will reach wider audiences in time to avoid the forthcoming mega-merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns HBO; the network is set to air the project sometime in 2027, before it eventually streams on HBO Max. “I’m not sure I trust David Ellison and/or Larry Ellison to be as supportive,” he said, referring to the possibility that the Paramount CEO and his billionaire father, both of whom have close ties with Musk, may not be inclined to back the film as much as HBO has thus far. (To further complicate matters, Semafor also reported this week that Paramount is considering asking Musk to become an investor to help the company absorb Warner Bros. Discovery.)
The film is certainly stuffed with material that, to my mind, could cause Musk’s allies to bristle at it reaching as many viewers as possible: Apart from the theory about Starlink satellites swaying elections, the documentary also raises questions about how DOGE’s access to millions of Americans’ personal data could violate individual freedoms, a concern that emerged even before DOGE achieved “God mode,” as my colleagues Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel reported. There are sections that look closely at Musk’s personal life as well, including his alleged betrayals of his former business partners at Tesla and his seeming obsession with having children with as many women as possible—so far 14 children with four women. (Musk settled a lawsuit filed by Tesla’s first CEO, Martin Eberhard, in 2009 that allowed Musk to be called a co-founder of the company.)
[Read: The decline and fall of Elon Musk]
Yet for everything that he gets to in Musk, Gibney said that he also left plenty out so the film wouldn’t balloon past its already-colossal runtime. He’d wanted to include more about how Musk’s bullish investment in AI makes the stock market more volatile, potentially damaging people's retirement funds down the line if the AI bubble bursts. He’d hoped to explore an angle on Silicon Valley’s ties to Russia. He had a “great whistleblower” on the story of SolarCity, a company founded by Musk’s cousins that was later absorbed by Tesla.
But what he’s ultimately missing, of course, is Musk himself. In the documentary, Gibney illustrates that his subject is worth intense analysis in part because it has become almost impossible to penetrate the muck that orbits the mogul—the paper trails of litigation, the rabbit holes of conspiracy theories, the fiery social-media exchanges. “In an interview, you want to be able to create a circumstance where someone is going to be reflective and considered and searching for deeper meaning,” Gibney explained. “I'm not sure Elon is in a place now where he does anything more than put a moat around himself.” To the filmmaker, Musk is merely the man behind the curtain, presenting an “Oz-like image”—an image that involves regularly calling himself a champion of free speech. If Musk truly means what he says, then he should be fine with a documentary interrogating his actions reaching as many viewers as possible.