In “Musk,” Alex Gibney Punctures Elon’s Self-Mythology
When Tesla introduced its first mass-market car, the Model 3, at an event in 2016, Elon Musk seemed like a different person from the one he is today. Boyish and trim, he started off his presentation by reminding the audience of Tesla’s mission and why everyone should care about what it was doing. “It’s very important to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport . . . this is really important for the future of the world,” he said. A screen behind him showed a chart of rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere; Musk noted that the line was still moving sharply up. “What that CO2 increase results in is a steadily increasing temperature. So we’ve already increased by two degrees. In fact, that doesn’t tell the whole story, because the extremes of temperature increased by as much as twenty degrees, and that line is gonna keep going for some time into the future.” Tesla was a critical part of pushing the world to electrify its vehicles, Musk went on, citing a former executive at General Motors who’d said that competitive pressure from Tesla pushed G.M. to introduce a hybrid car, the Chevrolet Volt, and spurred Nissan to release an electric model, the LEAF. Much of the rest of the industry soon followed.
Did Musk ever really care about saving humanity from climate change? It was certainly a compelling pitch: at a time when much of the innovation in the tech world seemed to come from social-media apps that caused more harm than good, here was a high-profile company dedicating itself to addressing one of society’s most urgent problems. The project required long-term vision and real manufacturing skill. It was firmly rooted in the real world, not the digital one. Later, after Musk became radicalized by factors including the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and turned into a hateful menace on Twitter, I used to remind myself and others that he had at least done one really good thing early in his career—he had pushed the auto industry to electrify.
The documentary “Musk,” directed by Alex Gibney, does an excellent job of expunging that narrative. The film is an exhaustive recounting of Musk’s metastasizing role in our society. During a nearly four-hour runtime, it takes in his development of the satellite technology that has become crucial to modern warfare, his obsession with spawning children, and his transformation into a poster boy for global fascism. “To make this film, I set out to solve a mystery,” Gibney says in the documentary. “How could Musk assume so much power, and why had we given it to him?” The resulting film is mesmerizing. But it’s also chilling, because even after so much examination, there’s still no straightforward explanation for Musk’s hold on society, and no clear path to wresting back control. (Ronan Farrow and Lawrence Wright, both writers at this magazine, are among the producers of the documentary.)
The movie is yet another entry in a growing genre of anti-oligarch cinema that has filmmakers grappling with the billionaire takeover of our economy and politics. The fall release slate includes “The Social Reckoning,” which dramatizes the 2021 whistle-blower scandal that engulfed Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook; “Artificial,” a fictionalized account of Sam Altman’s leadership of the A.I. behemoth OpenAI, a company that swiftly abandoned its own commitment to serving the public interest; and “Digger,” a dark comedy that involves an oil tycoon who unleashes an ecological catastrophe.
Musk didn’t speak to Gibney for the documentary, but it hardly seems necessary, given the vast trove of litigation files and X posts that the world’s first trillionaire has generated. (Musk has said that the film would be a “hit piece” and called Gibney a “douche.”) Gibney had his research team gather everything Musk had ever said in public, which must have been a dizzying data-management project. In lieu of an interview, Gibney created an unsettling digital avatar of Musk that says things the real Musk actually uttered.
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The movie builds methodically, like a prosecution. Most of the evidence it presents is known in its particulars—Musk is surely one of the most publicized figures in the history of the world, his every decision and noxious rant magnified by a million fans and haters online. But Gibney’s distillation of this story into a single viewing experience creates a damning portrait of an emotionally unstable individual with the levers of power in his hand and no evident moral compass.
From the beginning, Musk is portrayed more like a self-promoter than a business genius. He was adept at advancing upward, even in the wake of failures. Before he was pushed out of the first company he co-founded, called Zip2, which essentially put the Yellow Pages on the internet, programmers reportedly had to rewrite some of his code, which was so hard to unravel that it created a “hairball.” At X.com, which was originally conceived as a precursor to PayPal, Musk’s collaborator, Peter Thiel, organized the board to enact a coup to remove him as C.E.O. After PayPal was sold, he took his two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar payout and used it to invest in Tesla, which had been started by two engineers, Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard. By that point, Musk was already managing SpaceX, a company he eventually marketed by suggesting it would ferry people to colonize Mars. None of this stopped him from maneuvering Eberhard out of Tesla and taking control of the company. Later, when settling the lawsuit that Eberhard inevitably filed, Musk specified in the agreement that he forever could be described as a “founder” of Tesla, even though he technically wasn’t one. This was the beginning of the myth, as the documentary presents it. In Gibney’s telling, Tesla isn’t an earnest vehicle for promoting sustainable transport—it’s a company that milked government-issued climate credits and made promises about autonomous driving that were never delivered. (Some of the most upsetting footage in the film is of deadly crashes that occurred while drivers had their Teslas on “Autopilot.”)
The most fascinating part of the first half of the movie, which covers Musk’s business endeavors and personal life, are the interviews with his first wife, Justine, and his later romantic partner Ashley St. Clair, both of whom had children with him. St. Clair reveals the mechanisms that Musk uses to control the women who have borne his kids. (He has acknowledged fathering fourteen.) One of Musk’s fixers, a man named Jared Birchall, supplied a detailed child-support agreement with different levels of payments depending on how coöperative St. Clair was with the nondisclosure agreement he wanted her to sign. When she balked, Musk’s support payments to St. Clair were slashed. (Musk disputes elements of St. Clair’s account.) She calls Birchall a “demon” and Musk a “nuke.” The account provides helpful context for understanding the public drama of Musk suddenly dumping Shivon Zilis, his most recent partner and the mother of four of his kids.
During the film’s second half, Musk becomes more and more radicalized as he accumulates unchecked political power. He takes over Twitter, guts the company, and invites Nazi sympathizers back on the platform. He aligns himself with Donald Trump and is given permission to gut parts of the federal government with no accountability. Surely most people would prefer to see big cuts to federal agencies made with thoughtfulness and care? Instead, the project is executed so sloppily and pointlessly that it comes off as more of a performance of cruelty than anything else.
During a question-and-answer period with Gibney after one of the screenings I attended, the filmmaker said that he hoped people would watch “Musk” in time to make more informed decisions during the midterm elections. This seems wise: all Americans should probably watch this film like their life depends on it. Gibney explained that when someone first suggested doing a Musk documentary, he didn’t want to do it. “It’s a slog and it takes a certain amount of determination to keep going, and there are certain risks involved,” Gibney said. “But it’s how I was raised. There’s a sense in the gut that really gets offended by people who abuse their power. I almost can’t help myself.” ♦
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