MUSK is too much time with Elon Musk. Four hours of your life is a hard bargain. You already agree, probably, as Musk is not some mysterious figure. There’s a whole social network where you can hear him if you want to, and you don’t, so do you want to now? For four hours?
Prolific documentarian Alex Gibney makes bog average documentaries about complicated people and institutions you already know how you feel about. He’s made some documentaries about the Catholic Church (Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, 2012), the Church of Scientology (Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, 2015), and Elizabeth Holmes (The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, 2019). Gibney’s talent is in packaging a breadth of information he is curious about until his thirst is satiated. His informational format often plays like a long-form, meandering book report about subjects the audience already knows pretty well if they’re interested to begin with.
And yet with MUSK, Gibney stumbles into a massive ethical dissonance. After all is said and done, the documentary arrives at an inflection point about the dangers of AI, and then the bottom falls out. Musk famously refused to participate and called the work a “hit piece” (generous advertising), so Gibney recreated him with AI, as though he were participating anyway. This becomes the central framing device: through various AI-assisted graphics, Gibney has his cake and eats it too, building a wraparound story about Simulation Theory and how Musk got very rich by treating life like a videogame. By leaning so heavily on AI to make this point, Gibney tanks his own legitimacy, as his actions drift far from his words. The filmmaker seems to enjoy the very thing he critiques, invalidating his work in the process.
It’s hard to come back from that. The other truth about MUSK is that, while it otherwise organizes a great deal of information well, it’s utterly exhausting. We’re all tired, and MUSK will test the patience of even the strongest-willed among us. Because the subject is so hard to spend time with, it helps that the first half is full of other voices, building useful context for how Musk failed his way to the top. Half the film shows how we got here; the other half shows how Musk used his infinite wealth to shield himself from the consequences of everything it took to get there.
If the first half is a calmly reflective summary of a late-capitalist empire, the second half shows the very system that enabled Musk’s success collapsing in real-time. It’s harrowing, dissociative stuff, so deeply panicked — and not helped by the AI dissonance — that the overall effect is more disorienting than legible. When we finally come up for air, it’s too late. Musk has won. The government has been gutted of every agency that may stop him. It suggests infinite and endless power, and with any luck, ought to look pretty ridiculous once political power swings back the other direction. God willing.
Musk called the documentary a “hit piece,” and if you’re him, that’s a fair thing to call it. But if that’s true, it only gets there by using his exact words and actions (even if it uses AI to make him speak the words he has already said). It’s for sure not a hagiography, giving special emphasis to Musk’s eugenics-like fixation with populating the world with his own children he can then disown. What emerges is a sociopathic tendency in Musk to treat every item of life as a business venture, wherein anything that gets in the way is just an obstacle to be cleared, and people are disposable resources.
MUSK is a hard watch. It’s long and that’s not a problem in itself. How it uses the runtime is more jarring. What stands out as a takeaway is that Musk does not really care about reality, so much as perception and being well-liked. The good news is it’s hard to like him after watching MUSK. The bad news is you probably already agree if you’ve gotten this far. And yes, it’s all bad and as dark as it seems. The world really is burning. Always has been. And the ones who are burning it down are not really going to take us to Mars. But once we all understand there are no next steps, it’ll be too late. MUSK says: it already is too late. Perhaps that’s why MUSK uses the tools it presents as the tools of the oppressor, because by looking too long into the abyss, we see the abyss looking back, and there’s an empty place there, where the humanity used to be.