The Reel Review
Elon Musk, the richest individual on Earth, seems to be everywhere nowadays through his ownership of SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla and X – companies that have given him an inordinate amount of power on the global stage. This documentary from filmmaker Alex Gibney (Totally Under Control, Zero Days, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief) questions Musk’s “accomplishments,” revealing him as a self-absorbed charlatan who isn’t nearly as clever as he’d like us to believe.
The best part of Musk is how it connects the dots on the motives for his actions. The first two hours focus on his toxic ego (insisting on being called the founder of Tesla despite being only its main investor); his reckless promotion and cost-cutting shortcuts of self-driving Teslas that have killed dozens of people; obtaining huge federal government loans to fund SpaceX alongside the wildly false claims he will colonize Mars; and a burning obsession to have as many children as possible.
The documentary takes an even darker turn in the second two hours, focusing on the factors that turned Musk far-right politically – his annoyance that the COVID pandemic disrupted Tesla production, his rage at having a strong-willed transgender child and the realization that he could easily manipulate Donald Trump by tipping the 2024 election results for him with what Musk himself dubiously describes as a data anomaly. The payback? Musk, through the creation of DOGE, dismantles the very government agencies that were investigating him and likely would have landed him in prison for his questionable business practices.
While extremely comprehensive, the film, however, is not worthy of its exhausting four-hour runtime – two and a half hours would have sufficed. Gibney’s trademark talking head interviews with former Musk colleagues, family members and some of his baby mamas is where the documentary is most revealing with Musk’s own comments being some of the most damning. Where the film falls a bit short is in Gibney’s over reliance of a distracting AI-generated Musk and overly-repetitive video game visuals to illustrate Musk’s self-absorbed view of himself as the sole player in his video game of life, one where the rest of us are all just NPCs – non-player characters. Even so, witnessing the global power Musk now wields is terrifying, making this must-see viewing.
REEL FACTS
• Elon Musk and Donald Trump are both in the Epstein files, with one key e-mail from Musk to Epstein in November 2012 asking what day/night would be the wildest party to attend on Epstein Island.
• Musk is known to have fathered at least 14 children, with those close to him saying that number is likely much higher.
• Billionaire-owned social media companies – YouTube, Meta/Facebook, TikTok and Musk’s own X – have either refused and/or drastically limited advertising to promote this film.
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