After four years chasing a story that kept outgrowing itself, director Alex Gibney is finally releasing his nearly four-hour documentary on Elon Musk — and the billionaire at its center wants nothing to do with it. “Musk” opens Friday in Los Angeles and New York, arriving in theaters not because Musk cooperated but because he refused to, leaving Gibney to build the film around interviews with Musk’s family, former friends and employees, journalists and business associates instead.
Gibney began work on the project in 2022, according to the Los Angeles Times, which reported that the director initially admired Musk’s clean-energy ventures and his online engagement before the project ballooned into something far larger. Musk himself declined to be interviewed for the film, as reported by The Atlantic, so the filmmaking team instead built a computer-generated digital representation of Musk, pieced together from his previous interviews and public appearances, to stand in for him on screen.
The documentary examines Musk’s rise, his growing political influence and what Gibney describes as an accumulation of power — a man, in the director’s framing, “stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data,” as he told the Hollywood Reporter. According to the Los Angeles Times, producer Jessie Deeter tried to persuade Musk to participate before the film took its current shape, an effort that ultimately went nowhere.
A Project That Kept Growing
What was supposed to be a two-hour HBO documentary finished in late 2024 instead kept expanding, eventually reaching a six-hour cut before being trimmed down, the Hollywood Reporter’s account of the production notes. HBO executives urged Gibney to keep following the story as Musk’s political role grew, and the finished film now runs 225 minutes with a 10-minute intermission built in, according to the BBC. HBO has acquired the film’s television and streaming rights and plans to air it in the first quarter of 2027, per Variety.
Before its theatrical debut, “Musk” had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival and later screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Times reported. Reviews cited by the BBC have been largely favorable: Variety called it “a lacerating and important watch,” while The Telegraph gave it four stars, describing it as “a chillingly forensic hatchet job.”
Musk Fires Back, Lawyer Raises Lawsuit Threat
Musk has not stayed quiet about the film. He has attacked Gibney repeatedly, at one point calling “Musk” a “hit piece” and a “psy op,” and reportedly responded to the director by publicly calling him a “douche,” according to the Los Angeles Times. His attorney, Alex Spiro, has gone further, raising the prospect of a defamation suit specifically over the film’s treatment of the 2024 presidential election, as noted by Deadline.
Jigsaw Productions, the company behind the film, has defended its work as a fact-based examination of a powerful public figure protected by the First Amendment, telling The Atlantic that it has “the right to engage in open debate and fact-based examinations of powerful public figures.” The fight over the film has become its own story, with public attacks, threatened litigation and lingering questions about distribution. Universal is still moving forward with an international release, though no overseas date has been set, Variety reported.
Ashley St. Clair, Private Texts and a Tesla Crash
Among the people interviewed for the film is Ashley St. Clair, the conservative influencer who has a child with Musk and who, per the Los Angeles Times, called Musk “a nuke.” St. Clair shared private texts from the run-up to the 2024 election, in which Musk referred to an “anomaly in the matrix” and “10,000 lasers in space.” Variety reported that the film portrays those exchanges as part of its examination of Musk’s role in that race.
The documentary also alleges that Tesla hid data from a 2019 crash in Florida in which a Tesla Model S ran through a T-intersection and killed a 22-year-old woman, according to Deadline. The film depicts Musk’s arm-extended gesture at a 2025 Trump inauguration event, and it addresses reporting by the Wall Street Journal that Musk used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms in 2024 — an account Musk has denied, saying instead that he takes prescribed ketamine for depression, per the Los Angeles Times.
Data, Power and the Midterms
The film’s broader argument leans heavily on concerns about data access, including concerns about DOGE’s access to sensitive data. Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton has raised concerns about risks from artificial intelligence.
Musk, who is 55, continues to wield influence across self-driving cars, rockets, Twitter, artificial intelligence and American politics, the Los Angeles Times reported, noting that the Pentagon has also announced Musk will help lead a project examining the future of warfare.
