Musk: ★★★★
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Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, who has already made features about corporate greed with Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and investigated the increased use of torture methods by the US military in Taxi to the Dark Side, now takes a microscope to one of the world’s most powerful and chronically online individuals, Elon Musk.A four-hour deep dive into the life and (unfortunately) the mind of the planet’s biggest stroppy teenage tech megalomaniac and richest man ever sounds almost painfully too long. However, this direct and wide-spanning documentary maintains its momentum throughout, oscillating between whimsical roasting of the babbling bozo that Musk is seen to be, and the brutal realities of his rise to power. Musk doesn’t relent from its frankly terrifying journey alongside Elon’s rocket-powered, bullsh*t-funded ascendance, and four hours really does fly by (with a helpful interval midway through).
Naturally, there are a lot of Musk-is-a-space-fascist implications, which are intriguing and damning, but not a new accusation. What the documentary really opened the door to was the personal side of Elon’s life. Revelations into his cult-like desire to have a “legion of children”, and the “gatling gun of sperm in his DMs”, as told by the mothers of a selection of his children, namely Ashley St. Clair and Justine Musk are fascinating and worrying.
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Justine and Ashley both reveal many distressing elements of their respective relationships with the man, and his treatment of the women who bear his children, allegedly referred to as the ‘breeders’. We also hear from Elon’s father, which is a small but interesting insight into Elon’s upbringing – I’d have liked to hear more about the time before Elon got to Silicon Valley and began to barge his way into the public eye, but I guess there’s only so much you can fit into four hours.
Centred around an uncanny valley AI-generated Elon, who often interjects with their disturbing insights, the documentary goes back and forth between Alex’s narration, interview excerpts with former colleagues, associates, friends, and lovers, and this interview with this Muskstron Grokmonster. Between real footage of Musk’s journey to becoming Dr Evil is a garish video-game animation that knits scenes together as a first-person video game, in which the viewer is playing Musk as his apparent main character complex sees himself while he destroys the various institutions that he heads up, namely Twitter and various government departments through his role at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The section about the DOGE is where I felt a discernible intake of breath from the audience, as the somewhat playful, roast-like imagery of Elon made way for very real images of the impacts of the DOGE’s restriction of USAID, and its disastrous and fatal repercussions; a note in my notebook read, “this just got serious, he is evil”, with ‘evil’ underlined.
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Other than DOGE, and Elon’s relationship with Trump, Musk gives a pretty thorough but rapid dissection of SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter, and the failures, cover-ups, and fatalities that have stacked up during his time in charge of all of them.Entertaining and informative, Musk is not a sleepy documentary; it hits you in the face with space lasers, rocket explosions, AI, and a whole lot of Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Pocketed throughout are sincere and honest interviews that really do offer an insight into the man who shows no signs of slowing down his global money and power grab, and you may leave it wishing that he does indeed make it to Mars, on his own, and very quickly.
Musk will show at the London Film Festival on the 9th and 10th of October, and will begin its US release on 9 October, with a wider UK release not yet confirmed.
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