Alex Gibney has built a career on getting powerful people to sit down and explain themselves. But for his new documentary, Musk, the director had to accept a strange twist: the only person close to Elon Musk who said yes immediately was Musk’s own father. “We had Errol Musk at ‘hello,’” Gibney says. That early victory was both a relief and a warning. Errol’s relationship with Elon is notoriously complicated, and his eagerness to talk suggested that no one else would be easy. Over the four years it took to make the film, Gibney and his team spoke with scores of Musk’s associates, family members, former partners, journalists, and business colleagues. Almost everyone needed persuasion. “It was very difficult to get people to appear because the risk profile for talking about Musk in a way that was honest was high,” Gibney says. The result is a nearly four-hour documentary, complete with a 10-minute intermission, that paints a damning portrait of the world’s most famous billionaire. In Gibney’s telling, Musk’s real genius is not engineering or physics but something more slippery: an ability to promote his own mythology, and by extension the stock price of Tesla and SpaceX. The film is not an attack from the outside. It is built from interviews with people who know Musk, plus a simulated Elon made from Musk’s own words. Musk himself never agreed to sit down with Gibney, so the director did the next best thing: he created a digital version of Elon, one that speaks in Elon’s actual voice, using actual recordings, and appears throughout the film as a through line. That choice is not just a workaround. It is a way of taking Musk seriously on his own terms.
Gibney’s interview list reads like a map of Musk’s private and public life. His first wife, Justine Musk, appears. So does Ashley St. Claire, who had a relationship with Musk. Journalist Kara Swisher, who has covered Musk for years, speaks; so does LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who has watched Musk’s transformation from Silicon Valley celebrity to something more polarizing. WIRED’s global editorial director Katie Drummond also spoke with Gibney, as did this writer. The fact that so many people eventually agreed to be interviewed is remarkable, given the fear that surrounds Musk’s name. People with careers, money, and families to protect are not eager to criticize a man who can move markets and shape the online conversation. But Gibney says landing Errol Musk was the breakthrough. “Everybody else took a lot of persuasion.” The elder Musk’s immediate yes opened a door. Once one person close to Elon was willing to talk, others could see that the documentary would not be a one-sided hit job. It would be a serious exploration of a very public and very contradictory life. Still, the risk was real. To speak honestly about Musk is to risk being attacked by his followers, or worse, by Musk himself. That is why the film’s existence feels like an event. It is not just a biography; it is a collection of testimonies from people who decided, after years of silence, that the story needed to be told.
The most audacious element of Musk is the simulated Elon. Since the real Musk would not sit for an interview, Gibney’s team went through every public comment Musk has ever made and used his actual audio recordings to build an avatar that appears throughout the film. The avatar is not a cartoon or a cheap deepfake trick. It is a deliberately designed figure, one that Gibney made attractive, because the film is interested in how seductive Musk’s vision can be. “What were we gonna do? He’s the main character,” Gibney says with a shrug. But the deeper reason is thematic. Musk has spent years talking about the idea that we are all living in a simulation. Gibney decided to play in that sandbox. If Elon believes reality is a simulation, then a simulated Elon is the perfect way to interrogate him. By using Musk’s own words, the film avoids the accusation that it is putting words in his mouth. The result is a strange and unsettling experience: Elon Musk is everywhere in the film, and nowhere. He speaks, but he does not answer. He argues, but he cannot respond to what his ex-wife or his father says. The simulated interview becomes a mirror, reflecting the gap between the myth Musk has created and the human being behind it.
At four hours, Musk is long, but it needs to be. Gibney and his editors gathered so much material that even the nearly four-hour running time required tough decisions. There was more on the cutting-room floor than in the finished film, and one can imagine the discarded scenes: another former colleague, another boardroom story, another tweet. But the film’s length is also a statement. The story of Elon Musk cannot be told in ninety minutes. It is a story about family, money, trauma, ambition, and the peculiar way American capitalism rewards confidence over competence. Gibney’s portrait is damning because it is patient. He does not need to exaggerate. The facts are already strange enough: a father who seems eager to talk, a string of brilliant engineers who helped build companies that are now associated with Musk’s name, and a man who has convinced millions that he is the only one who can save humanity from itself. The film shows how Musk’s genius for self-promotion works. It is not just about getting attention. It is about controlling the narrative so completely that the stock price rises and the public accepts him as a visionary. That, Gibney suggests, is the real product.
One of the film’s greatest strengths is that it does not reduce Musk to a villain. The people who agreed to speak are not all enemies. Justine Musk’s presence is complicated: she was married to him, she knows his flaws, but she is not merely seeking revenge. Reid Hoffman, a figure from the business world who knows Musk well, brings a different kind of perspective. The documentary allows these people to speak at length, and in doing so it creates a fuller picture of a man who is both visionary and fragile. Gibney’s own voice, as a director, is less angry than curious. He seems fascinated by the way Musk uses his own mythology as a shield. When Gibney says “We had Errol Musk at hello,” there is a hint of amusement, as if the filmmaker knew that this story would be strange from the start. The father’s eagerness to talk is itself a detail that humanizes the story. Even a man as powerful as Elon Musk cannot control his own family. And the fact that his father, of all people, was willing to sit down with a documentary filmmaker says something about the tangled family dynamics that helped make Elon who he is. The film does not pretend to know everything. It simply lays out what people were willing to say, and what Musk has already said himself, and lets the audience decide.
In the end, Musk is a documentary about storytelling. Elon Musk tells a story about himself: the genius engineer, the savior of humanity, the man who will take us to Mars. Alex Gibney has made a film that tells a different story, using Musk’s own words as evidence. The simulated Elon is a perfect metaphor. In a world where Musk insists we are living in a simulation, Gibney creates a simulated version of Musk to show that the simulation is not reality. The real Elon Musk is not an avatar. He is a father, a former husband, a CEO, a man who has done remarkable things and also caused enormous harm. The film, which opens nationwide on Friday, is not a biography in the usual sense. It is an interrogation of a myth, conducted with the tools of cinema. Gibney could not get the real Musk to sit down, but he found something better: the record of everything Musk has said, and the testimony of the people who know him best. “Everybody else took a lot of persuasion,” Gibney says. But they came. And their words, combined with Musk’s own, make for a portrait that is hard to look away from. The film is long, nearly four hours with an intermission, but it earns its length. It gives the audience time to sit with the contradictions, to hear the voices, and to wonder how one man could become so many different things to so many different people. That is the mystery at the heart of Musk, and Gibney has captured it.
