On Friday, the nearly four-hour documentary Musk, directed by Alex Gibney, opens in American cinemas. Elon Musk himself declined to be interviewed for the film, so its makers modeled his image with the help of artificial intelligence, assembling all of the entrepreneur's public appearances into a single whole. The only person who agreed to appear on camera right away was his father, Errol Musk. "We got Errol Musk at the door," Gibney recalls. The crew went straight to see him in South Africa.
The director worked on the film for about four years. He told journalists that persuading other participants was difficult, as many were afraid to speak openly about Musk. In the end, the cast included his first wife, Justine Musk, a former partner, Ashley St. Clair, journalists and former colleagues. Musk himself, having declined the interview, called the director a "horrible person" and a "lackey of the far left" on his social network X. According to the Associated Press, he has not seen the film.
Since Musk did not take part in the filming, the team created his digital double. An avatar seated in a gaming chair appears throughout the film and speaks lines that Musk delivered at various times on podcasts and in interviews. Gibney explained that he deliberately made the simulation appealing: "He is the star of my film, and I want the star to look good."
Musk's first wife, Justine Musk, agreed to an interview after a year of persuasion. She said that at college she was drawn to her future husband by his enormous self-confidence. In the film, she recalls the death of their first child from sudden infant death syndrome. According to her, Musk claimed the child died in his arms, although in fact it happened in hers.
Another former partner of Musk, Ashley St. Clair, provided an audio recording for the film in which his representative offers her a non-disclosure agreement in exchange for financial support for their child. St. Clair claims she turned down about $40 million in order to keep the right to speak freely.
The film also covers the work of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Musk headed last year. As the film asserts, the department fired 300,000 federal employees but did not achieve its stated goal of reducing the budget deficit. Former US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power links the closure of the USAID agency as part of this reform to the deaths of thousands of children.
This was not about cost-cutting, fraud and abuse. This was the dismantling of the regulatory state.
— Samantha Power, former US Ambassador to the UN
The picture also touches on technical matters. It claims, for instance, that the founder of Tesla was Martin Eberhard, not Musk; later, under the terms of a court settlement, Eberhard agreed to call Musk the founder. The film also mentions 67 deaths linked to malfunctions of the Autopilot driver-assistance system, which the filmmakers describe as advanced cruise control.
According to the director, he was finishing the two-hour version of the film when Musk publicly backed Donald Trump after the assassination attempt on him in 2024. At that point, the management of HBO, where the film was slated to air, asked Gibney to keep working. As a result, the film's running time nearly doubled. The film's distributor, Bleecker Street, ran into difficulties placing advertising on social networks, and Musk, according to press reports, threatened the filmmakers with lawsuits.
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