Scroll back a decade and Elon Musk’s reputation, much of it derived from the best PR money could buy, seemed unassailable. A not-quite rags-to-riches story of a South African immigrant (later a U.S. citizen under questionable circumstances), Silicon Valley start-up founder, and visionary with a genius IQ (maybe) and a benevolence that transcended politics, left or right, Musk could have spent the intervening years as a behind-the-scenes mover and shaker, investing his riches into any number of promising technologies, delivering the occasional Ted Talk, and basking in his celebrity status, second only to Steve Jobs as a deity-like figure among online tech-heads.
That, at least, was the story Musk wanted the general public, his investors, and the politicians who lavished him with government largesse to believe. The last ten years have proven the Musk-as-genius narrative rooted more in fiction than in fact. It’s still a narrative, however, that filmmaker Alex Gibney (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, Taxi to the Darkside, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), wants to shattter once and for all in his aptly titled documentary, Musk. Over four exhaustive, arguably exhausting hours (including a much-needed) ten-minute intermission, GIbney makes a damning case against Musk and his destabilizing, ultimately destructive influence on American politics. Musk’s status as enabler, banker, and, at least publicly, “friend” to the current occupant of the White House will be keenly studied in American history and political science courses in decades to come.
Unsurprisingly, Academic historians and political scientists will wonder “how” and “why” a once seemingly apolitical tech entrempreneur became not just aligned with the far-right, but the “how” and “why” he became alighed with a specific political party and, more importantly, decided to bankroll its party and its manifestly unfit, cult-like leader, Donald J. Trump, spending approximately $300M in the 2024 presidential and congressional elections to sway an already primed electorate to repeat the mistakes they made in 2016. As a reward, Musk awkwardly campigned with Trump, called himself “Dark MAGA” and later, “Dark Gothic MAGA,” while Trump’s supporters unapologettically cheered him on.
In addition to collecting, collating, and editing archival material for his documentary, Gibney interviewed Justine Musk (nee Wilson), Musk’s first wife, podcaster and philosopher Sam Harris, a one-time Musk friend and confidante, Martin Eberhard, Tesla’s co-founder, Tech reporter and podcaster Kara Swisher, writer-novelist Cory Doctorow (the concept of “enshittification” originated with him), Geoffrey Hinton, a cyber-scientist considered the “Godfather of AI,” and among others, Ashley St. Clair, an ex-MAGA influencer, one of Musk’s romantic partners and the biological mother of one of his children. St. Clair and Musk didn’t “meet cute” in the romantic-comedy sense. They first met through social media, exchanging private messages before meeting up IRL (in real life), and later, agreeing to co-parent a child.
Bolstered by the sociopathy all too typical of the super-wealthy, Musk’s immaturity, messianic impulses, and above all, his narcissism, ultimately dictated otherwise. Between taking undeserved credit for Tesla and SpaceX, companies founded by others, but singularly identified with Musk’s “genius” as a future-forward visionary, his growing status as the Internet’s monst annoying “reply guy,” and a self-belief bordering on the delusional, Musk’s outsized reputation began to crumble. As his once most fervent supporters on the left shrank, Musk double- and triple-downed, revealing himself as a petty, thin-skinned, grievance merchant, a huckster over-promising and under-delivering (so many exploding rockets), and a distubring embrace of white supremacist/nationlist views.
No longer contempt to hide his reactionary political leanings and risk the erosion of his customer base, Musk openly courted the far-right both online and off. Purchasing Twitter on the equivalent of a whim, Musk claimed his ownership of the social media giant would usher a new age of “free speech” absolutism, not the supposedly censored (i.e., moderated) iteration of the past. Almost overnight, Musk fired close to half the staff, gutting content moderation, and lifting lifetime bans on the worst offenders, including the current occupant of the White House, whose personal account was suspended only after he led the January 6th, 2021, insurrection to overturn the free and fair results of the 2020 presidential election.
Musk’s “free speech” absolutism, of course, was nothing but a lie. Twitter became a free-for-all. Without content moderation, misinformation and disinformation became the norm, foreign bots flooded timelines, and Musk’s rejiggered algorithm fed a constant diet of right-wing propaganda to millions of users. When that wasn’t enough to swing the 2024 presidential and congressional elections the GOP’s direction, Musk went all-in, contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to right-aligned PACS (political action committees, a band on democracy anywhere and everywhere).
With so much ground to cover in less than four hours, Gibney speed-runs through much of Musk’s backstory, from his not-so-humble beginnings, to start-up success, canny investing in Tesla and SpaceX, the latter’s near-failure numerous times, Musk’s switch from AI doomsayer to AI cheerleader (as always, it’s all about the Benjamins), and Musk’s aura-based stock manipulations (selling Tesla’s EV credits to polloting companies) that increased his net worth by the tens, if not hundreds, of millions. Gibney also covers the human costs of Musk’s hucksterism, the auto-pilot misfires in numerous Teslas that have resulted in injuries, even death, to Tesla owners, their passengers, and innocent bystanders.
As Gibney spells out in his documentary, Musk’s actions werent guided or directed by a false or misplaced sense of benevolence, but by a ruthless calculation: Whatever mazimizes his power, influence, and wealth are always considered “good.” Anything else doesn’t bear discussing, let aloner considering in a serious manner. That serves as background for Musk’s raid on the federal bureacuracy in the spring of 2025 as the leader of DOGE (Department of Governmental Efficiency), a collection of Musk’s most trusted acolytes used not track down “fraud, waste, and abuse,” but to end any criminal or civil investigations into Musk’s companies or himself. Using budget-cutting as their rationale, they fired tens of thousands of government employees. Their efforts didn’t meaningfully cut the federal budget. Instead, it gave them access to sensitive federal information, including voter data that could be used to manipulate future elections.
The rest, unfortunately, isn’t history; far from it. Musk remains a present-day danger to not just American democracy, but democracy in general. Musk openly supported — and continues to support — Germany’s far-right political party, the AfD, Musk has already spent as much, if not, more in the 2026 mid-term elections. All, apparently, to evade accountability and avoide responsibility for ethically dubious, potentially illegal conduct as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
And even if and when the GOP loses the mid-term elections as predicted, Musk will still be an inextricable part of American politics and our economic lives. That alone makes Gibney’s docmuentary must-see filmmaking. What we do with Gibney’s documentary, acquiescence or activism, is purely up to us.
Musk opens theatrically in North America on Friday, October 16th, via Bleeker Street. Check the official site for showtimes in your area.
