Ken Cedenoupi - UPI Alamy News via Bleecker Street If Elon Musk is a genius at anything, it’s making people think that he’s a genius. This becomes obvious early on in Musk, director Alex Gibney’s 235-minute documentary about the conditions that allowed for the creation of the world’s richest man. Gibney portrays Musk as a sort of grifter savant, someone who’s spent his entire life slipping out the back door of various lies, schemes, and outright frauds. His only real skill is charming investors, reporters, and the general public into believing that he has anything but his own interests in mind; trying to explain what it’s like working with him, one interview subject parses the difference between “lies” and “bullshit.” That being said, this isn’t the “hit piece” Musk immediately dismissed it as on, ugh, fine, X. After the Nazi salute that wasn’t (or was it?) at Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, a common theme in the media flurry that followed was, essentially, “what’s this guy’s deal?” Musk is asking a similar question, following the South African entrepreneur as he glides his way from the dot-com ‘90s to 2010s Obama-era techno-optimism to Trump 2.0, enriching himself at every turn. And although it can only hint at the answers — megalomania, basically, and maybe drugs — it explores the culture around Musk in enough detail to explain how we got here. As a subject, Musk is slippery, and even Gibney — an Oscar-winning director who has done documentaries on Enron, Elizabeth Holmes, Scientology, and the Catholic Church — has trouble pinning him down. He refused to participate in the film, and instead appears as a smirking CGI avatar that repeats on-the-record statements Musk has made over the years. This is one of the film’s less successful gambits, and not just because it was partially accomplished through the use of AI — a counterintuitive choice, given how hard the movie goes on Musk’s, let’s say, evolving stance on the technology. (That’s a nice way of saying that he called AI an “existential threat” to humanity until he started investing in it.) Gregg Segal via Bleecker StreetThe movie’s other video-game inspired touch, which turns the Twitter offices (and, later, the White House) into first-person shooters with Musk as the player and the rest of us as NPCs, is more evocative. Musk isn’t the only person who thinks that he’s at the center of an elaborate simulation created only for his benefit. (The 2021 documentary A Glitch in the Matrix is about this very subject.) But it’s not hard to understand why it might be a problem for someone with enough money and power to actually play the rest of us like pawns on a chess board to believe such things. In many ways, Musk is a condemnation of Silicon Valley startup culture, where the founder is sacred and everyone sees themselves as a millionaire in waiting. This is where the cult of Musk first thrived, after — at least, this is how the doc frames it — he paid off the original founders of Tesla to become the co-founder of Tesla. (One of them, Mark Eberhard, appears in the documentary, although his allegations are mild compared to what follows.) The movie’s most damning evidence is presented in this first half, by an attorney representing the family of a woman who died after she was struck by a rogue self-driving Tesla. The company says one thing; the video proves another. Musk, of course, does not comment. There are characters in Musk besides Elon Musk, even if he might not perceive them as such. MAGA influencer (and the mother of one of Musk’s many children) Ashley St. Clair plays an interesting role here: Her beliefs make her deeply unlikable, but she makes some bombshell allegations here — specifically, she implies that Musk was involved with rigging the 2022 U.S. presidential election — that make her a valuable asset to the film. Musk’s father is another interesting one, recalling the time he stabbed some men he refers to as “intruders” to death in the Musk family living room in a startlingly indifferent tone. AP via Bleecker StreetBut although she doesn’t appear on camera (and fair enough), the most important supporting character in Musk is Musk’s daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson, whose transition from male to female seems to be —along with your typical COVID brain rot — what prompted Musk’s wild pivot towards right-wing politics. This is where Musk really takes a turn. Although Gibney argues that it was all, basically, bullshit, it’s possible to conceive of Elon Musk the inventor and the space-travel pioneer as an extraordinary person. But once he’s gotten all that money, the things that he does with it are so depressingly typical that it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there’s really nothing special about this guy. So why, then, do we allow this blackpilled weirdo who consistently misunderstands the point of classic sci-fi novels (his worst crime, in some circles) to have so much power over our lives, except that we’ve been conditioned to think of wealth as a virtue in itself? It takes a long time to get to this conclusion, and some of what’s covered in Musk has already been reported elsewhere. But you need to see the whole picture to really understand what’s going on here, which makes Musk’s extended run time necessary, if not necessarily pleasurable. The last hour of this documentary is extremely frustrating, not least because the wheels of the master plan — such as it is; his main goal at this point seems to be escaping prosecution — Gibney lays out here are already in motion. (The New York Times just ran a story about Musk’s record-breaking donations to the Republican Party leading into the 2026 midterms.) What’s really interesting is that, until a few years ago, a four-hour documentary about Elon Musk would have been widely expected to have a positive slant. (In fact, this very publication used to have an email newsletter dedicated to Musk-related news updates.) But when Musk screened at film festivals earlier this fall, reviewers talked about seeing the film in masochistic terms, and multiple people expressed sympathy that I had to “suffer through” what they assumed would be a painfully cringeworthy and enraging viewing experience. And, to be fair, it was, although it was enlightening as well. So how did Elon Musk fall so far, so fast? Thankfully, there’s no need for a four-hour followup to explain it. The evidence is all right here.From Bleecker Street, Musk is now playing in select theaters, with a nationwide expansion scheduled on October 16.