Illustration by Robert Carter Late one August afternoon in a Manhattan editing suite, with thunder and lightning raging outside, a storm was also brewing inside. Or at least on the giant screen at the front of the room.
“How’s power feeling, Mr. Musk?” a bystander calls out to Elon Musk onscreen as the beaming tech mogul strides through a post-inauguration Washington building. In the next scene, Musk sits at a roundtable with his army of early 20s DOGE staffers, looking on proudly alongside Fox News’ Jesse Watters. The young men talk with easy, deluded confidence about how they will fix government as Watters jokingly refers to the notoriously anatomical nickname of one of the men.
Related Stories
Movies Forget the Red Carpet -- Venice's Real Stars Are in the Documentaries This Year
Movies Alex Gibney's Elon Musk Doc Will Play TIFF, Setting the Stage for an Epic Culture Wars Battle
Illustration by Robert Carter At the back of the editing room, Alex Gibney, the longtime documentarian and the closest the current film world has to a Bob Woodward, watches intently.
“Let’s do that ‘power’ quote hotter,” Gibney says to a team of five that includes his frequent producer Erin Edeiken and sound mixer Tony Volante. “Hotter? Yes,” Volante says, adjusting levels on the screen in front of him.
Gibney has been working since late 2022 trying to get a temperature read on Musk only to see the mercury continue to climb. He had finished — or thought he had finished — a two-hour HBO documentary on Musk in late 2024, having plumbed the controversial entrepreneur’s childhood, his early PayPal-ish forays into Silicon Valley, his supercharging of SpaceX, his takeover of Tesla, his launching of the satellites of Starlink, his hirings and firings at Neuralink, his bull run into Twitter, his various mad dashes through wives and baby mamas, and many other events that would make most humans seek out a long, uninterrupted Xanax vacation.
Then Musk donated ungodly sums and made appearances to help deliver the presidency to Donald Trump, who returned the favor by giving Musk the Chewbacca seat on the Millennium Falcon. Suddenly the story seemed to hold another chapter. HBO executives called Gibney telling him they wanted and would finance more. He kept shooting. And shot some more. For nearly two additional years, all the way to a six-hour cut of the movie that went deep on Musk’s 2025 DOGE era and his SpaceX IPO plate-spin this summer. (The film has since been cut down.)
Over the course of a decorated career, Gibney, 72, had taken on Scientology and Enron, the U.S. military and Vladimir Putin, the Catholic Church and Wall Street. All of that prepared him, though nothing could really prepare him, for this magnum Musk creation — cinema’s premier curtain-puller on power revealing the man who has amassed so much of it. When it comes out this fall, Musk will look to change the game in several crucial ways, lining up a target that Hollywood never shoots at, seeking to become a hit documentary in an era allergic to them and trying to open the eyes of American voters to a key Republican electoral arms dealer who Gibney says is mounting an unfair fight. At stake with Musk, its creator wants to tell us, is nothing less than the future of democracy. And to spread that message, he has enlisted some of the biggest media companies around — including, improbably enough, the one soon to be owned by Trump ally David Ellison.
Today, Gibney is making small tweaks to finish the film in time for screenings at the Venice and Toronto film festivals in September (three hours, 45 minutes), a wide theatrical release in October (ditto) and an HBO debut in 2027 (four hours). There are sounds to adjust and effects to complete and even video game reenactments to perfect. What better way to take on a maximalist than maximally?
The sound on the DOGE scene in front of him calibrated, Gibney gives a small look of approval. “Great,” he says. “Now let’s go to Watters and Big Balls.”
***
Elon Musk is not an obvious candidate for a documentary. A documentary aims to tell us something new, and Elon Musk epitomizes the familiar. We take stock of his trolls on X, we see him artwash his image on Saturday Night Live, we get a load of his engineering and entrepreneurial genius from biographer Walter Isaacson, we learn about his stock market genius on CNBC, we hear him talk about the goal of further populating the planet, we hear one example after another of his personal efforts in pursuit of that goal, we eye with skepticism his proclaiming the age of Mars colonization and extraterrestrial data centers, we watch him (and then try to unwatch him) gleefully talk of slashing-and-burning aid workers from inside White House meeting rooms.
So much Musk have we ambiently ingested these past few years that perhaps the best cultural gift might be a break from all that, an Elon-free zone populated with anyone besides the 55-year-old provocateur.
Yet Gibney aggressively wants to challenge that instinct, and he may have a point. None of what we have seen and thought about Musk can fully ready us for what the filmmaker has done here — an adventurous but methodical movie grounded in the thesis that, as he sees it, a dangerous huckster is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data. Gibney’s basic take on Musk is that he’s a confidence man whose power comes only from the stock market and disappears the minute we see through the facade of sales pitches — but can do a whole lot of damage until that happens.
The film world-premieres Sept. 8 at Venice. But its cultural reach will likely extend far beyond that. Musk stands poised to touch off a fresh wave of anger and fear among the millions already inclined to worry about him, into and well after the midterms, while fueling a whole lot of trollishness (and worse?) from the many who worship at the temple of Elon Musk, including Elon Musk.
Gibney has crafted a movie that, while not new in its specifics, is often damning in its totality, standing apart from anything the media entertainment complex has recently turned out — a portrait of power with the cinematic scope of All the King’s Men and the potential social impact of The Pentagon Papers. (“It’s rare these days to see a complete story instead of the fragments we’re used to,” says Anonymous Content’s Nick Shumaker, a producer on the film.) Some will surely find Musk overly negative and conspiratorial. Yet nearly every time the film seems like it might tip into paranoid fantasy, Gibney unearths a new fact or asks a new commonsense question to steady us back.
Gibney spends the first half of the film coming at Musk for various alleged sins, including stealing credit from original Tesla founder Martin Eberhard; bullying a woman who birthed his child to sign an NDA; pumping his stocks with shaky talk of Mars exploration and full self-driving cars (the latter of which Gibney also alleges are responsible for more than 60 deaths); and turning a light on the monkeys experimented on at Neuralink who advocacy groups say suffered needlessly. Not nearly as adept at all the substantive tasks of running a company as he claims, Elon Musk, Gibney argues, excels mainly at selling tall tales.
Even the multiple levels of alleged villainy, however, seem narrow compared to what the director argues is the real game: world domination. In Gibney’s telling, to witness Musk, intentionally or not, convert his satellite internet system, Starlink, into an unelected policymaker given its crucial role in Ukraine and other war-torn places; to see NASA rely so heavily on SpaceX to perpetuate its space program; to watch Musk seemingly use Twitter to garner business favors from world leaders like Modi and Milei; to look with growing dread as the data collected by DOGE potentially becomes a sleeper cell for campaign research and political retaliation — to observe all of this is to gaze upon a man interested not only in wealth and status but in an oligarchal sway that transcends elections’ fickle seasons. Donald Trump may have spent six years bringing the branches of government to heel. But in Gibney’s accounting, Musk is in the process of pulling off something far more menacing: rendering government obsolete altogether.
Two revelations, or at least intimations, especially stand out, both involving elections and Musk’s alleged techno- surveilling means of moving them for Republicans. In one, Musk ex and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, a central figure in the documentary, describes the events of Trump’s election in November 2024. Musk, she says, had a “degree of certainty” about the results before they came in that “I had never seen before.”
“He had told me [before the election] he was going to unleash the ‘anomaly in the matrix,’ ” she recounts, as a text exchange between them pops up onscreen backing up the claim. We see Musk telling her, “I have ten thousand lasers in space.”
“So you think he was referring to Starlink?” Gibney asks off-camera. St. Clair replies, “I mean, I don’t know where else he has space lasers.” Gibney leaves the insinuation hanging — was this a troll or a confession? — but hints he is taking it seriously when he then says in his patented voiceover, “What is Elon building, what are his goals, what are his actual motivations, and do we even know this man at all?”
The other piece of the electoral-manipulation insinuation looks not backward but forward and suggests that Musk’s four-month stint in Washington last year did more than gleefully ax 270,000 federal employees and untold billions in life-saving aid (though a section on the latter, anchored by former USAID chief Samantha Power, lands with an outraging wallop). During that time, Gibney suggests, Musk also had access to and potentially collected intimate data on tens of millions of Americans possibly even for later political use. In a follow-up email, Gibney explains further: “We don’t know what DOGE/Musk did with the data to which they had access. What we do know — via my own source who ran IT at a major federal agency and via the whistleblowers and public accounts — is that the DOGE Boys had Super Admin status to federal IT systems. That means they could just slide a copy of the data on all of us to SpaceX as easily as dropping a file into a folder.” (The allegation of salting away data squares with a whistleblower complaint filed by the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer.)
“How much data exists in the federal government about every single person living in this country, their voting records, everything that they had ever done?” Wired editor-in-chief Katie Drummond, whose publication led much of this coverage, says in the movie. “Imagine what an AI could do if it can be trained on all that information.”
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-prize-winning godfather of AI, offers a specific use case: leveraging the data into an unfair campaign advantage. “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he says onscreen. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.”
Documentarian Alex Gibney, photographed Aug. 20 in Brooklyn, has made a career of exposing abusive power structures, from the U.S. military to Scientology. In Musk, he feels he has found a uniquely dangerous subject: Musk may have left Trump’s side, but what havoc could he wreak, Gibney asks, with the data he surely collected from his short stint atop the so-called Department of Government Efficiency? Photographed by Jake Chessum ***
For much of the past 20 years, as television news resources and audiences for longform investigation have waned, documentary filmmakers have risen to take their place. Leading that class has been Gibney.
A kind of documentary journeyman, Gibney’s standing changed in the mid-2000s, when, after the age of 50, he directed the eye-opening Oscar nominee Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side, an intimate, upsetting story of the killing of an Afghan taxi driver by American soldiers during an interrogation. Arriving in George W. Bush’s second term, the film became a focal point for all the frustrations and qualms around the War on Terror. A spate of exposés of other corroded powerful institutions followed as Gibney turned into a kind of investigative journalism gunslinger, coming in to showdown against powerful institutions when few others would.
All those films feel like they were leading to this, a point even Gibney will concede. “It’s not the end of the path, but it’s definitely a distillation of the journey,” he says of Musk.
As Gibney sits in the edit bay adjusting small details — “Let’s let Trump’s voice go on longer and more distorted so it reads like it’s in Elon’s head,” he says during an Oval Office scene — his worldview comes into focus. Gibney’s tendency is to see the darker side of power and the powerful side of technology, tendencies that cast him as an outlier in the 2010s but have made him more relevant as the years have gone on. In an interview with this reporter about his Stuxnet film Zero Days a decade ago, he outlined hacking threats that seemed exotic, like compromising an American water system. With reports recently about Iranian operatives trying to do just that, they don’t seem so outlandish.
“I try to tell a story that opens our eyes and makes us ask the right questions,” he says, speaking of Musk but offering a touchstone that might apply to many of his films.
Gibney here has set out to make a movie less about its subject’s history than his future. Sam Harris, the right-leaning podcaster and friend turned enemy of Musk, lays out this theme onscreen near the end of the film. “We are living in a world where one person’s psychopathology and neuropsychological dysregulation is translating into massive consequence in our politics, in our economy, in our geopolitics,” he says. “It’s completely insane we have one person who’s this chaotic — who’s completely unelected — and has this much power.”
Gibney makes it clear that he doesn’t think such voices are hyperbolic, and that it is only a certain kind of American heuristic that prevents us from hearing them. “People assume because he’s very rich that he’s not crazy,” he says. “But the terrifying thing might be that he’s crazy and he’s very rich and powerful. That’s the warning bell the film sounds.”
The director’s method for ringing that alarm will surely draw debate. Musk did not sit for an interview, going on the offensive at the announcement of the film three years ago by taking to X to call it a “hit piece.” This prompted Gibney, who never met a diss he couldn’t deadpan back, to reply “How would you know?” The line was meant as both undress and challenge, as Gibney at that time still sought an interview. When Musk effectively ended that hope by tweeting, “Gibney is a douche,” Gibney parried back, “Douché,” marking perhaps the first time in human history that a rap battle was settled with an accent aigu.
That rejection turned out to be a blessing, birthing dozens of outside sources Gibney turned to instead, on- and off-camera. It also yielded a formal magic trick unexpected in the work of an Oscar-winning documentarian. Gibney and his research team scraped the internet for any audio of Musk they could find. They then created — stick with me here — a video game avatar of Musk speaking those words, Ready Player One-style. The Musk avatar also, in a pair of first-person-shooter sequences, moves through the world as a vintage video game character, complete with health bars and lives left and colorful respawns.
“I wouldn’t have gone there if Elon wasn’t so relentless,” Gibney tells me when asked what motivated this choice. “But over and over again in our research, Elon kept coming back to this idea of simulation, how we’re living in an existential video game.” Gibney adds, “We’re playing with levels of reality, and the elements of the Elon Musk story are how he intends to define reality.” (This same wry mischief can be found in the closing credits song, a bouncy original number written and performed by David Byrne that takes jagged pieces of Musk’s own self-mythologizing quotes and slashes him with them.)
The effect of Gibney’s digital avatar is surreal, and also its own comment, at once turning Musk into a leather-jacketed larger-than-life character while completely gamifying all his ambitions. The way to neutralize the world’s most powerful man, Gibney believes, is not to cower at his influence but to extend him the same cat-with-a-ball-of-yarn unseriousness he shows us.
The move could certainly backfire at a moment when the documentary (and nondocumentary) film world is wary of digital replicas replacing the real thing and AI deepfakes blurring the truth-fiction line. But Gibney says the whimsical device comes in service of a larger truth: the unmasking of a man who has aggregated power only by duping us into thinking we should give it to him. “The Great and Terrible Oz kept people in check because they were afraid of his visage that loomed over everybody, and he used that power to exert an enormous amount of control,” Gibney tells me. “But when a little dog pulled aside the curtain, and you can see a frumpy man operating gears and levers, suddenly he wasn’t so terrible and he wasn’t so great.”
“I try to tell a story that opens our eyes and makes us ask the right questions,” notes Gibney, who says he initially admired Musk and proudly owned a Tesla car and solar panel system. Photographed by Jake Chessum ***
Gibney presents an intriguing paradox. A Maine resident, he is nonetheless a fixture on New York’s media and entertainment social scene, moving among the kind of powerful people he frequently turns the heat-blaster on. If this has proved conflicting, Gibney does not let on, marching from sacred target to sacred target with little apparent tentativeness.
The director has a kind of serious casualness in which he shoulders the weight of the world, but unfussily. Gibney’s is a no-nonsense, bullshit-averse demeanor, which comes out in the editing session when a performative Trump administration ally appears onscreen, prompting an eye-rolling expression with some salty assessments tossed in.
For someone who has made a career scalpeling the powerful, it perhaps comes as a surprise that Gibney had never thought of making a documentary about Elon Musk before — and in fact resisted the idea when the Chinese former real estate baron Zhang Xin suggested it to him in 2022 — feeling like so much had been said and, also, wasn’t Musk sometimes a force for good, remaking industries at will?
“To be honest, I was on the fence about it,” Gibney says. “But then I talked to a close friend, and he said it was a film about 21st century power, and that resonated with me.”
Realizing also that part of his daily life — he was long active on Twitter and had once bought Tesla solar panels — revolved around the mogul, and that no one was really asking questions about what this meant, Gibney sought early financing partners. He found a group of liberal-adjacent production companies ready to work with him, including Anonymous Content (Navalny), the upstart doc banner Double Agent (run by an indie film veteran named Dana O’Keefe and joint venture of the narrative film producers Black Bear Pictures and New Regency) and Zhang Xin’s Closer Media.
Given the sensitivity of taking on one of the world’s most powerful men (who already viewed the movie as a hit piece), those producers might have expected that they would have to finance the making of the film itself without a sales partner. But when producers took the project out to the market, they were taken aback.
Companies that liked to play it safe were willing to take on the far right-flirting Musk. (It was, crucially, before he joined the Trump wagon, but still.) Most notably: Netflix, which pursued a deal despite the streamer avoiding globally polarizing topics like Jamal Khashoggi, surprising even some of the producers.
Gibney weighed his options but felt most comfortable with another suitor, HBO’s documentary division, with which he has done some of his most impactful work, including movies about Theranos and Scientology. And so filmmakers in 2023 signed a pact with the platform for U.S. streaming and television rights. In doing so, the parties defied a long-held convention.
“Hollywood is either averse to making Elon Musk films because of his politics or afraid of Elon Musk because he could sue,” says Ashlee Vance, the author whose 2015 biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, itself was strangled in development by HBO in 2023 because of what Vance believes were those hesitations. “It makes it that much more surprising this film got through.” (The idea of featuring Elon Musk, of course, has not been anathema in fictional works; as Gibney shows in the film, image-burnishing appearances have cropped up everywhere from Iron Man to The Simpsons to SNL.)
Host Elon Musk during the monologue on Saturday Night Live on Saturday, May 8, 2021 Will Heath/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images Then there was the matter of international rights. Most documentaries get sold territory by territory since the interests of countries on a given topic vary, as opposed to one worldwide distributor. This is especially true for a controversial subject — giant global players don’t want a headache because of sensitivities in Croatia.
All of which made it unexpected that Universal, one of the biggest international film distributors around, wanted all foreign rights. For the filmmakers, this of course would potentially mean a lot more scrutiny and studio battles than with individual territory buyers. But the idea of making a bigger impact won out.
HBO declined to comment about its involvement. This can seem like a strange turn — you can’t put out a movie to tens of millions of people and not want folks to notice — but given Musk’s power and eagerness for a brawl, perhaps logical too.
Another entanglement comes in the form of one of the financier-producers. Black Bear is run by Teddy Schwarzman — son of Stephen Schwarzman, the founder of Blackstone and someone who has moved in close circles with Musk, both men part of Trump delegations that met with foreign leaders. (Stephen Schwarzman has called Musk a “fascinating guy” and “good person.”) His son’s willingness to bankroll the most high-profile takedown of Musk in history makes for a potentially interesting Thanksgiving family dinner. Teddy Schwarzman, notably, did not personally take a credit on the film. He did not wish to comment for this piece.
HBO’s centrality is especially intriguing. Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s parent company, has been run by David Zaslav, a known associate of Musk, the two men prominently sitting together in a luxury box at the U.S. Open two years ago. Gibney’s movie already was well underway. The two even discussed WBD television projects at the match, according to a person familiar with their conversation. But if Musk asked Zaslav to kill the film, the media executive didn’t oblige.
Yet huge questions remain given the upcoming changing state of WBD management. Incoming WBD owner Ellison may well run HBO by the time the movie hits the service on an unnamed date in the first half of 2027, and one can’t imagine him feeling too enthused by the onscreen happenings. In addition to the general air of Silicon Valley and Donald Trump skepticism, Ellison’s father and principal financier, Larry Ellison, gets a negative shout-out when he is shown in text messages willing to airdrop Musk $2 billion to buy Twitter, no questions asked. This is not what people pay $111 billion in acquisition fees to platform. Would David Ellison ask for changes? Pull the plug and force producers to self-distribute? (The filmmakers in an unlikely coup retained paid VOD rights.) Gibney and the filmmaking team are holding their breath. So is everyone else.
Driven by his interest in colonizing Mars, Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. Dan Tuffs/Getty Images Lost in Space A SpaceX rocket carrying a payload of Starlink satellites, adding to Musk’s already massive fleet — and the power it affords him. Kevin Carter/Getty Images ***
How will the movie land with both the public and power brokers? Isaacson’s 2023 book left a lot of reviewers cold with its lack of criticism but still sold a gazillion copies. Gibney’s film could well prove all those book critics right and extend the skepticism to a general public that Musk has to this point kept at bay.
The days of An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11, in which a documentary becomes an event that moves both box office needles and public sentiment, are well behind us. But is it possible that at this post-Twitter moment, with a need for common vehicles of activism and a new town square, a citizenry this fall will find refuge in Gibney’s movie? It could. Musk’s butchering of the old public commons could deliciously be the reason we make his takedown the new one.
The film’s length could paradoxically work in its favor, too, rewarding those who soldier through its four-hour run time with a badge of endurance, not to mention cocktail party cred. “The thing that drives people to theaters is urgency — people feeling that they have to be part of a conversation,” says Kent Sanderson, CEO of Bleecker Street, which is releasing the movie. “And there’s no conversation like the one around someone who affects every single person’s life every single day.”
And don’t sleep on the Oscar chattering class. Musk will get a big push for best documentary, and it remains, at this summer vantage point, hard to see what can match it. The biggest X factor, as it were, is how Musk responds. Social media trolls are almost certain, but would he go beyond that? Musk has a history of lashing out legally at those he perceives as harming his interests, filing lawsuits against boycotting Twitter advertisers and his AI rival Sam Altman. The insinuations of business hucksterism are one thing that could provoke him, more intimate details are another. Musk’s personal life comes in for tough scrutiny in the film, with St. Clair’s nauseating details about paternity-based NDA bullying and hush payments (stealth audio from a Musk fixer especially churns the stomach) and her no-comment about his drug use, and with a revealing childhood story Musk’s father tells in which a family friend undergoes a medical emergency while they were all on a road trip in Musk’s native South Africa. The man dies as everyone tries to resuscitate him. Young Elon, his father recounts, reads a comic book, unreactive through the entire episode.
Gibney and HBO are insured, and a high-profile group of lawyers has been vigorously stress-testing the film. (Helping matters is that Gibney bases large portions of the documentary on the published work of text journalists from Wired to The Wall Street Journal; the movie is nothing if not a valedictory for journalism.) Yet that has never stopped a litigious tycoon — especially these days — from going after a media outlet to make a point or extract some concession.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk listens as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images Alternatively, Musk could learn from the Church of Scientology, which to protest the alleged misrepresentations in Gibney’s 2013 exposé Going Clear took out a full-page ad in The New York Times seeking to debunk the movie. It sent viewership skyrocketing.
As Gibney locks in during the editing session, all of that future noise stays outside. More relevant is Musk’s future, as the director tweaks a scene about what the mogul is up to next (humanoid robots and launching himself off a burning planet to Mars).
“As he accretes more power, he’s no longer interested in checking his worst impulses,” Gibney says to me, reflecting on Musk’s trajectory. The director pauses, remembering a moment from his reporting. “Someone who worked closely with Elon told me, ‘He’s the most miserable man I’ve ever met.’ So he’s inflicting his misery on everyone else.” The suffering will pile up, Gibney says, until we see what’s behind Toto’s curtain.
The Musk Myth
How Hollywood burnished the entrepreneur’s image as a benevolent genius.
Iron Man 2 (2010)
The mere juxtaposition of Musk and Tony Stark implants the idea that the former inspired the latter. The line Musk utters to a passing Robert Downey Jr. (“I have a good idea for an electric jet”) suggests a concept he never had and the reaction of Stark (“Then we’ll make it work”) an easy execution he’s seldom achieved.
The Simpsons (2015)
Musk arrives in Springfield, where he promptly sets out making alternative energy power plants to help humanity even at the expense of his own profit. Lisa calls him “possibly the greatest living inventor,” and characters regard him as “an intelligence far beyond ours.”
The Big Bang Theory (2015)
“It feels great to come down here and help the less fortunate,” a real-life Musk tells an awestruck Howard Wolowitz in a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving. Elon Musk, he’s just like us (only more charitable).
Rick and Morty (2019)
Musk plays an alternate-reality version of himself known as “Elon Tusk,” who joins the title pair in a plan to defeat the evil Heisotron, even polishing his family-man image with a reference to his kids.
Saturday Night Live (2021)
In inviting Musk (pictured above) to host (over the objections of some castmembers), the show mostly let him good-naturedly clean up his COVID conspiracy theories, give free plugs to DOGEcoin, garner sympathy by discussing his self-reported Aspberger’s and talk about sending people to Mars in a rocket ship as if it’s a real thing.
This story appeared in the Sept. 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
