Alex Gibney's "Musk" Documentary Punctures Elon's Self-Mythology

Alex Gibney's nearly four-hour documentary "Musk" dismantles Elon Musk's self-narrative as a climate savior, presenting him instead as a self-promoter who exploited government climate credits and made unfulfilled promises about autonomous driving. The film, produced by Ronan Farrow and Lawrence Wright, features an unsettling digital avatar of Musk since he refused to be interviewed, and draws on litigation files and X posts. It traces his career from Zip2, where programmers rewrote his "hairball" code, to X.com, where Peter Thiel organized a board coup to remove him as CEO, and to Tesla, where he maneuvered out co-founder Martin Eberhard and secured the right to be called "founder" in a lawsuit settlement. Interviews with his first wife Justine and later partner Ashley St. Clair reveal control mechanisms, including a child-support agreement with varying payments based on her cooperation with an NDA, facilitated by fixer Jared Birchall. The second half covers his radicalization: taking over Twitter, inviting Nazi sympathizers back, aligning with Donald Trump, and gutting federal agencies. The film is part of a growing genre of anti-oligarch cinema, alongside "The Social Reckoning," "Artificial," and "Digger." Gibney hopes viewers will watch before the midterm elections to make informed decisions. The documentary offers a damning portrait of an emotionally unstable individual with power and no moral compass.