"Even dog shit deserves more respect than Gibney" — that's what Musk posted on X on September 9th, taking aim at the director of his own biographical documentary, Musk. The line alone pretty much tells you what kind of film this is going to be.
Musk runs nearly four hours long, with a built-in ten-minute intermission, and is directed by Alex Gibney. Gibney's back catalog reads like a checklist of controversy: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, a documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, and a film examining torture during America's War on Terror. Bringing him on to make a film about Musk already signals exactly what kind of direction this is heading — this isn't going to be a flattering portrait.
The film covers Musk's leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his deep entanglement with the MAGA movement, his repeatedly delayed tech promises, and accidents tied to Tesla's self-driving systems. It also digs into a theory that had mostly circulated on the fringes of the internet: whether Musk used his Starlink satellite network to tamper with the 2024 US presidential election in Trump's favor. The claim gained traction after Musk's ex-girlfriend Ashley St. Clair publicly shared text messages in which Musk allegedly hinted he could exploit "an anomaly in the matrix" to influence the election outcome. There's no evidence such manipulation is technically feasible, but the texts have been attributed to Musk.
Musk himself is clearly not a fan of the film. He's threatened to sue Gibney for defamation and has gone after him directly on X, calling him "a bitter old man who lost the plot long ago" and slamming him as a "terrible person" with "zero integrity."
Ironically, Musk currently holds a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The film gets a limited theatrical release starting October 9th, expanding wider on October 16th, distributed by Bleecker Street Media.
