Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’ Is a Reminder, not a Revelation
Jigsaw Productions
Throughout a myriad of ages, civilizations, and cultures, humanity has given itself all the right warnings. Aphorisms about how power corrupts. Fables of nude emperors assured of their glory. Proverbs balancing all the profits of the world against the loss of one’s soul. Poems about the mightiest of works now crumbling to nothing in the deserts of time. Sermons declaring that God and Mammon are opposing forces who refuse to share allegiance. Myths of how the power to create endless, instant gold creates death, instead.
We still haven’t learned.
We still idolize those who rise to power. Though we have crafted our own preferred mythological framework for this class of superhumans. Our emperors are not insulated by the divine right of kings; rather, they are those who are self-made, who created something out of nothing (a rather divine act, in its own right), who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Or at least, they are those who appeared to do all that. These are the emperors who were (reportedly) once nude, but whom we shall now clothe with our loyalty. No longer shall we worry about the calculus of losing our souls for the sake of gaining wealth. We’ll entrust our souls to these towering figures, our meager spirits added to their vast treasuries.
Alex Gibney has a long and tenured career making documentaries about powerful cheats and fraudsters. Some of his subjects have fallen from grace, denuded in the eyes of the public: Lance Armstrong, Elizabeth Holmes, the executives of Enron. Others—the Church of Scientology and pharmaceutical companies among them—maintain a tight grip on their control. These latter are instructive comparisons for his latest documentary, Musk. These institutions share something with the head of SpaceX, Tesla, and X: They are broadly reviled and distrusted, yet they also have enormous dominion and devoted adherents. They form a distinct category—is it a uniquely American one?—of economic superposition. Hated and adored, clearly guilty of acts that are criminal or, at the very least, morally condemnable, yet they continue to wield leverage over our public life.
Gibney’s four hour affair tracks the maneuvers of Elon Musk from Zip2 all the way to xAI. By design it’s an exhausting and infuriating watch. The film draws on insights from journalists, biographers, and experts who have crossed paths with Musk at various points along the way; it also shares the experiences of some of Musk’s ex-wives, former partners, and former employees. Musk proceeds roughly chronologically, but the story it tells is not linear so much as one that forms a constellation.
The image that forms is one of a man whose foremost concern is how the world sees him. Wealth and power aren’t the end goal, in themselves, but they are the means by which he can control that public image. From the very first days at Zip2, Musk insinuated himself into that great American heritage of the self-made man—the inventor, the entrepreneur, the sui generis genius. He managed to turn middling companies into large profits, creating larger (still middling) companies and gathering even more wealth, until eventually he could run some of the biggest companies in the world. Elon is a salesman who pitches himself as an engineer.
The documentary methodically peels back these layers of Elon’s self-mythologizing. He began Zip2 with significant wealth from his father, undercutting a rags-to-riches story. Musk projects himself as “the alpha” (going so far as to say that to his first wife, Justine), but he harbors adolescent grudges when he doesn’t get invited to the party. His decisions are based on impulse and spectacle, not economic acumen or scientific rationality. At one point Gibney’s film quotes Arthur C. Clarke’s aphorism that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And herein lies the kernel of truth: With Musk, the technology is secondary to that magic, but that is only the first step. For that magic is, in truth, mere legerdemain. Musk pulled a three card monte on Silicon Valley VCs, and then he hustled the online conservative sphere.
The most incisive line in Musk discerns Elon as “a skilled inventor of his own value.” The smoke and mirrors form a sort of a prison eventually, intoxicating the salesman into believing his own pitch. In the latter half of the film it becomes ever more clear that Musk is chasing the dragon of public fame. Throwing baseballs through truck windows, waving around chainsaws, proclaiming himself as “dark MAGA,” and always, eternally posting edgelord takes on X—every choice is about feeling cool, about looking cool to his audience. And if his audience is a padlocked echo chamber of sycophants, then that’ll do.
The thing is, hardly anything I’ve noted to this point is a revelation of Gibney’s film. For all its scope and length, Musk doesn’t dig up anything new or provide clarity where there was doubt. Elon Musk has been an (excessively) public figure loudly enough and for long enough that we understand rather well who he is. The many voices that Gibney highlights, including Justine Musk, Zoë Schiffer, and Cory Doctorow, have published abundant material revealing Musk’s personal and public deceptions. He lied about the range of Tesla vehicles and presented Tesla Autopilot as much more capable and mature than it was, resulting in numerous deaths. His grudge against Twitter led him to drastically overpay so he could own it. The AI he paid to create, Grok, has repeatedly posted antisemitic and Nazi content, as well as produced AI-generated child pornography per the request of users. His ironically titled Department of Government Efficiency gave him access to the highest halls of power (and vast troves of our personal data), and he quickly cut funding from anything he didn’t like. This included many departments and entities that were investigating his companies for regulatory violations. Surely a coincidence? The cuts also included USAID programs—and for these whims, hundreds of thousands will die around the globe.
We know who Musk is, and Musk doesn’t really add to that image. The smartest move Gibney makes is in the very opening, allowing Musk, himself, the opportunity to provide the most braindead voice over imaginable. Other choices fall flat, however, most notably the recurring animated interludes that Gibney refers to as “a kind of documentary video game.” But these moments fail as both a document and a game, instead weakly padding an already lengthy runtime. And because this will all be familiar to even a casual headline reader, watching Musk feels a bit like turning on Sportscenter to replay highlights of the same (frustrating) game you just watched.
The section focused on Tesla-related deaths represents vital reporting on an entirely different plane. For these twenty or so minutes, Gibney’s film becomes fixating, furious, and tragic. A company lied about its products, and those products then killed people. These deaths were preventable—and not even preventable by redesigns or better engineering, but simply preventable by being truthful. The research and editing through this portion builds a damning case against Musk and Tesla, but this rigor is lacking in the rest of the film.
The biggest frustration with Musk is that it tends to ask the most obvious questions, the ones we already have answers to. The four hour runtime didn’t have space for other, far more troubling questions such as: Why are we so seduced by the “superhuman?” What is it about our governmental, economic, and social structures that enables such unbounded manipulation? Why does wealth always find a readymade cult within American society? Our problem is not that we don’t know these truths, but that public knowledge hasn’t brought consequential justice any nearer. These are the concerns I’m left pondering, but Gibney’s doc doesn’t take a single step toward even considering them. We’re just left with an image of the illusionist on stage, pulling from a bag of tricks that fail to convince, yet no one’s willing to close the curtains.
