Spare a thought for Alex Gibney. The Oscar-winning documentarian probably thought he had the year’s best documentary on lock with Musk, a 235-minute exposé of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Then he saw his movie hit theaters the same week as You Can See Everything, another very long film that captures the zeitgeist and monster box-office numbers by offering the entertainment possibilities of schadenfreude, a hissable villain, and Amanda Seyfried being awesome.
If you opted to see the latter film instead of Musk, I do get it. Four hours in the company of a fascist megalomaniac who can’t stop fathering kids who grow up to hate him is a lot to ask. The 73-year-old Gibney’s traditional narrative methods do look somewhat musty next to the performance-art stylings of You Can See Everything. Even so, Gibney’s film, like his other documentaries, is meticulously researched to the point of exhaustiveness. It taught me a great deal about the corporate and political shenanigans of a man who has done far more damage than Elizabeth Holmes, looks poised to do far more, and is currently trying to buy Texas’ midterm elections. I felt queasy after watching this, and while some of that was due to low blood sugar because the film ran past my dinnertime, much of it is from the film’s power.
The movie’s run time does include a 10-minute intermission that could easily have been longer. In fact, this would have worked better as a four-part TV serial, though streaming services like Netflix would probably have some qualms about incurring the wrath of Musk and his cult of right-wing followers. Gibney has never been afraid of postmodern storytelling devices, and he uses both video-game graphics to reflect the subject’s love of games and audio clips of Musk delivered by an AI recreation of him. (Is it creepier than the real guy? You make the call.) Appropriate though they are, both devices become wearisome over the course of four hours and remind us that other documentarians like the late Frederick Wiseman have gone on this long without numbing the audience. Sustaining a movie over this length requires incredible skill, and while Gibney is quite good, he’s not that good.
Nevertheless, Gibney digs up all manner of juicy tidbits, like witness accounts of how furious Musk became at Super Bowl LVII, when his tweet supporting the Philadelphia Eagles received far fewer reposts than then-President Joe Biden’s tweet doing the same. Musk flew directly to X headquarters from the game and made his engineers work overnight to rejigger the algorithm so that his own posts were featured far more prominently. (If the Eagles had won that game, would X still be useful? Hmmm.)
In addition, there’s valuable stuff about Tesla’s botched attempts at self-driving cars (which opened the door for Waymo), the roots of his transphobia stemming from his transgender daughter, and how his DOGE cuts to government staff created the Ebola pandemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Speaking of pandemics, COVID-19 appears to have helped break his psyche — for a man who imagines himself leading humanity into its future, having factories shut down by a teeny little virus must be intolerable. So, he kept them open, and all his employees got sick or were fired for refusing to come in.
Many critics of Musk are interviewed for this movie, but you may be surprised to find that the clearest-eyed one is Ashley St. Clair, the former conservative influencer who proves to be a fount of information. She not only saw Elon’s personal side from dating him for some years and giving birth to his child, but he also delegated much of his political strategy to her when he decided that he needed to back Donald Trump in the 2024 election to shut down government investigations into his own finances. She warns us that both conservatives and liberals are deluding themselves about him and that his government access has given him personal information about every American citizen, which he will use to shut down dissenters. She also supplies some compelling evidence that he’s a terrible father, both from personal experience and seeing the way he’s treated his exes and kids.
The whole affair lays out Elon’s vision of the future, and it is a world with no place for me, nor for any art, humor, or beauty. The only joy in it comes from engineers slaving away at their desks and shouting, “Yes, Elon!,” and if half a million Congolese people die because of their mistake, that just sucks for the Africans. I never joined Twitter, and while I test-drove a Tesla a few years ago, I never bought one. I now feel great about those decisions.
Musk
Starring Elon Musk. Directed by Alex Gibney. Written by Alex Gibney and Michael J. Palmer. Rated R.
