Alex Gibney<\/a><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of DOC NYC<\/p>\n
\n\tGibney, who has applied investigative rigor to Enron, Scientology, Casino Jack Abramoff and other targets in previous films, digs particularly deep into Tesla and its safety claims associated with self-driving technology. The documentary asserts Musk has vastly overstated the capacities of Tesla vehicles, dazzling 60 Minutes\u2019 Lesley Stahl and other journalists with displays of his electric cars proceeding under their own guidance, while hiding a frightening reality. It explores cases of Tesla owners who let the car do the driving, only to die in accidents or kill others on the road (like a 2019 incident in Florida when a Tesla S model ran through a T-intersection, killing 22-year-old Naibel Benevides Leon and injuring her boyfriend).<\/p>\n
\n\tThe film suggests Tesla lied about not being able to access data from its vehicle that struck Leon. Experts in the film also say Tesla has lied about the true range of its vehicle batteries and that it fraudulently promised to create a network of roadside ports where drivers could easily swap batteries, extending range (this dodge allegedly allowed Tesla to pocket millions in government subsidies predicated on the viability of the program). More darkly, Musk implies Elon wants the vast data a Tesla can accumulate on its owners to feed his AI ambitions.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe documentary spends considerable time exploring Musk\u2019s checkered romantic relationships, including with Justine Musk, his first wife who bore him six children (including the ill-fated Nevada, the boy who died at 10 weeks old from sudden infant death syndrome). He has rejected his trans daughter Vivian, one of his kids by Justine. The \u201cpro-natalist\u201d Musk has also sired three kids with the singer Grimes (aka Claire Elise Boucher), a baby mama relationship that has also soured.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"L-R](\"https:\/\/deadline.com\/wp-content\/themes\/pmc-deadline-2019\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tL-R tech journalist Zo\u00eb Schiffer, director Alex Gibney, and Ashley St. Clair attend the photocall of \u2018Musk\u2019 at the Venice Film Festival on September 8, 2026.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tTiziana FABI \/ AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n\tOne of the most absorbing parts of the film involves Ashley St. Clair, the conservative influencer, who bore a son by Musk in 2024. She chillingly describes encounters with Jared Birchall, a man often described as Musk\u2019s fixer\/enforcer, charged with muscling people like St. Clair under control. She refused to accept a financial settlement after her split with Musk that would have required her to sign a non-disclosure agreement; in lieu of an NDA, she freely speaks with the filmmaker about Musk in very unflattering terms.<\/p>\n
\n\tSt. Clair was involved with Musk during the time of the 2024 presidential election when Musk, as we all saw, threw his arms around Donald Trump and leveraged his vast wealth to help get Trump reelected. In the film\u2019s most sensational claim, St. Clair says Musk told her he would exploit \u201can anomaly in the matrix\u201d to affect the outcome of the race, citing his access to space lasers \u2013 an apparent reference to his network of Starlink satellites. Gibney lets it hang that Musk might have nefariously determined the winner of the presidency. I found this less than completely convincing, though I would love to see definitive proof.<\/p>\n
\n\tMusk, to my mind, is most successful at painting a psychological portrait of the multi-billionaire. Musk\u2019s father, Errol Musk, is interviewed in the film and relates a telling incident in which the family drove by the scene of a man who being resuscitated by the side of the road. Errol stopped the car and he recounts how Elon, then a boy, kept reading his comic book, completely ignoring the life-and-death drama in front of him.<\/p>\n
\n\tHis childhood in South Africa is explored, one where the potential for violence in the country\u2019s Apartheid era seems to have traumatized young Elon. He comes to Silicon Valley in his 20s and in short order has made millions from startups, including Zip2 (a kind of digital yellow pages), and X.com (not to be confused with his later acquisition, Twitter), a financial services and internet bank that merged with PayPal. In interviews back then, Musk comes off as awkward, a geek in pleated khakis with a receding hairline and uneven teeth. Before long, his wealth and his hair would expand, and the teeth would be straightened.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis insecure Musk dwells within the adult who craves constant attention through his social media platform and reacts with fury to perceived slights (the film suggests Musk turned on Democrats in part because President Biden didn\u2019t invite Tesla to an electric vehicle exhibition at the White House).<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tDonald Trump and Elon Musk, speak in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGetty<\/p>\n
\n\tAll this leads to Trump 2.0 when the reelected president handed vast power to Musk by appointing him chief of \u201cDOGE,\u201d the spurious Department of Government Efficiency. There, Musk\u2019s disturbing lack of empathy would glory in slashing jobs and spending, including on the vital USAID. The full catastrophe of DOGE hasn\u2019t been written, but Musk goes some way in exposing its arbitrary nature, grotesquely inflated claims of cost-cutting and utter failure as Trump negated any savings by handing a gigantic tax cut to the wealthy, ballooning the national debt.<\/p>\n
\n\tMost sinister of all, the documentary suggests Musk\u2019s real goal in getting into the White House was to access data on all Americans, once again to feed his pernicious AI dreams. The Musk of this film is unscrupulous, power-hungry, and narcissistic, the child of a distant, difficult father. No wonder he and Trump bonded \u2013 until they didn\u2019t, but then they did again, realizing they needed each other: Trump to get access to that colossal wealth and Musk to avoid government investigations into his enterprises and to maintain access to the federal piggybank and untold troves of data.<\/p>\n
\n\tAlex Gibney has made a lot of vital documentaries. This is his most important.<\/p>\n
\n\tTitle:\u00a0<\/strong>Musk
Festival:\u00a0<\/strong>Venice (Out of Competition)
Director-writer:\u00a0<\/strong>Alex Gibney
Distributor: <\/strong>Bleecker Street
Running time:\u00a0<\/strong>3 hrs 45 mins (plus 10-minute intermission)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What sort of billionaire criticizes another billionaire for giving tons of money to charity? The same kind of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1049585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[383918,66,171,53,2539,67,132,68,30989],"class_list":["post-1050846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-alex-gibney","tag-elon-musk","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-musk","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-venice-film-festival"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117235459864780919","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1050846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1049585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1050846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1050846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1050846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}