Jonah Reporting For HNews Wire Radio…
The richest man in Earth. Academy Award-winner’s incendiary new film shows he may be the most dangerous.
A storm was brewing inside a Manhattan editing suite on an August afternoon as thunder and lightning raged outside. Or on the huge screen in front of the room.
Do you feel powerful, Mr. Musk?A spectator cries out to Elon Musk as he walks through a post-inauguration Washington building. Musk and Fox News’ Jesse Watters watch from a roundtable with his army of early 20s DOGE employees. Watters jokes about one of the young men’s anatomical nickname as they talk confidently about fixing government.
Illustration by Robert Carter
Longtime documentarian Alex Gibney, the closest film industry analog to Bob Woodward, watches carefully from the editing room’s back.
Gibney tells his five-person team, including frequent producer Erin Edeiken and sound mixer Tony Volante, to make the ‘power’ quotation hotter. “Hotter? Volante adjusts screen levels, saying yes.
Gibney has been trying to measure Musk’s temperature since late 2022, but the mercury keeps rising. He finished — or thought he finished — a two-hour HBO documentary on Musk in late 2024, covering the controversial entrepreneur’s childhood, PayPal-ish forays into Silicon Valley, supercharging of SpaceX, takeover of Tesla, launching of Starlink satellites, hirings and firings at Neuralink, bull run into Twitter, mad dashes through wives and baby mamas, and many other events that would make most humans seek oblivion.
Musk donated huge sums and appeared to help Donald Trump win the president, and Trump gave Musk the Millennium Falcon’s Chewbacca seat. Story seemed to have a new chapter. HBO execs called Gibney to request and fund more. Shooting continued. Shot more. After nearly two years, the movie reached a six-hour cut that covered Musk’s 2025 DOGE era and SpaceX IPO plate-spin this summer. (The film was cut.)
Gibney, 72, fought Scientology, Enron, the U.S. military, Vladimir Putin, the Catholic Church, and Wall Street in a distinguished career. That prepared him, but nothing could prepare him for Musk’s magnum opus, cinema’s greatest curtain-puller on power showing the guy who has so much of it. Musk will try to change the game in several crucial ways when it comes out this fall, including lining up a target Hollywood never shoots at, becoming a hit documentary in an era allergic to them, and introducing American voters to a key Republican electoral arms dealer Gibney says is fighting unfairly. Musk’s founder claims the future of democracy is at stake. His message has been propagated by some of the major media corporations, including, ironically, the one shortly to be controlled by Trump backer David Ellison.
Today, Gibney is making minor changes to finish the film in time for September screenings at the Venice and Toronto film festivals (three hours, 45 minutes), a wide theatrical release in October, and an HBO debut in 2027 (four hours). There are sounds, effects, and video game reenactments to perfect. Why not maximally challenge a maximalist?
Gibney looks slightly pleased with the DOGE scene’s sound. “Great,” he says. “Now go to Watters and Big Balls.”
Elon Musk is an unlikely documentary subject. A documentary teaches us something new, and Elon Musk is familiar. We see his trolls on X, his artwashing on Saturday Nite Live, his engineering and entrepreneurial genius from biographer Walter Isaacson, his stock market genius on CNBC, his talk about further populating the planet, and one example after another of his personal efforts to achieve that goal. We also doubt his claim that Mars colonization and extraterrestrial data cent
We’ve consumed so much Musk in recent years that a break from him, a world without Elon Musk, may be the best cultural gift.
Gibney actively challenges that instinct, and he may be right. Nothing we’ve seen or thought about Musk can prepare us for what the filmmaker has done here—an adventurous but methodical movie based on the idea that a dangerous huckster is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data. Gibney believes Musk is a confidence man whose power originates from the stock market and dissipates when we see through his sales pitches, but he may do a lot of damage until then.
Venice hosts the Sept. 8 international premiere. But its cultural impact will certainly be much greater. Musk is prepared to incite millions of people already concerned about him to become more angry and fearful of him into and after the midterms, while fuelling trollishness (and worse?) from those who worship at his temple, including Musk himself.
Gibney’s portrait of power, with the cinematic scope of All the King’s Men and the potential social impact of The Pentagon Papers, is often damning and unique in the media entertainment complex. “It’s rare these days to see a complete story instead of the fragments we’re used to,” says Anonymous Content’s Nick Shumaker, a film producer.) Musk will likely seem too hostile and conspiratorial. Gibney brings us back with a new truth or logical inquiry almost every time the picture threatens to become paranoid fantasy.
Gibney spends the first half of the film attacking Musk for stealing credit from original Tesla founder Martin Eberhard, bullying a woman who birthed his child to sign an NDA, pumping his stocks with shaky talk of Mars exploration and full self-driving cars (which Gibney alleges have killed more than 60 people), and exposing Neuralink monkeys who advocacy groups say suffered needless harm. Gibney thinks that Elon Musk is better at marketing false tales than running a firm.
World dominance, according to the director, dwarfs even the numerous layers of suspected villainy. Gibney describes watching Musk, intentionally or not, convert Starlink, his satellite internet system, into an unelected policymaker given its crucial role in Ukraine and other war-torn places; seeing NASA rely so heavily on SpaceX to perpetuate its space program; and seeing Musk seemingly use Twitter to garner business favors from world leaders like Modi and Milei. Trump may have spent six years taming government branches. Gibney claims Musk is making government obsolete, which is much more dangerous.
Two disclosures, or intimations, about Musk’s alleged techno-surveilling of elections for Republicans stick out. In one, Musk ex-and conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, a documentary protagonist, recounts Trump’s November 2024 election. She adds Musk exhibited a “degree of certainty” about the outcomes earlier that “I had never seen before.”
“He told me [before the election] he was going to unleash the ‘anomaly in the matrix,’” she says, displaying a text exchange. We witness Musk telling her, “I have ten thousand lasers in space.”
“So you think he meant Starlink?Gibney asks off-camera. Saint Clair says, “I mean, I don’t know where else he has space lasers.” Gibney left the insinuation hanging—was this a troll or a confession? In his trademark voiceover, he asks, “What is Elon building, what are his goals, what are his actual motivations, and do we even know this man at all?””
The other electoral-manipulation allegation suggests that Musk’s four-month stint in Washington last year did more than gleefully ax 270,000 federal employees and untold billions in life-saving aid (though former USAID chief Samantha Power’s section on the latter is outrageous). Gibney claims Musk had access to and probably acquired intimate data on tens of millions of Americans for political use. Gibney adds in an email: “We don’t know what DOGE/Musk did with the data they had access to. My source, who handled IT at a key federal agency, whistleblowers, and public accounts show that the DOGE Boys were federal IT system Super Admins. They could slide a copy of our data to SpaceX as easy as putting a file into a folder.” (The Social Security Administration’s chief data officer filed a whistleblower complaint alleging data salting.)
“How much data does the federal government have on every American, their voting records, and everything they’ve done?The movie quotes Wired editor-in-chief Katie Drummond, who led most of this coverage. “Imagine what an AI could do if trained on all that data.”
Nobel-prize-winning AI guru Geoffrey Hinton suggests using data to gain a political advantage. “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he adds onscreen. If you wanted to corrupt midterm elections with AI, you just required precise U.S. citizen data. It looks like DOGE did what you would.”
Pictured Aug. 20 in Brooklyn, documentarian Alex Gibney has a career exposing oppressive power institutions, including the U.S. military and Scientology. He believes he has found a uniquely hazardous subject in Musk. Musk may have left Trump’s side, but Gibney wonders what he could do with the data he probably obtained from his brief time at the Department of Government Efficiency. Photo by Jake Chessum
As television news resources and audiences for longform research have declined, documentary filmmakers have filled the gap for 20 years. Gibney heads that class.
After turning 50, Gibney directed the eye-opening Oscar nominee Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side, an intimate, upsetting story of American soldiers killing an Afghan taxi driver during an interrogation. The film took center stage during George W. Bush’s second administration, highlighting War on Terror concerns. Gibney became an investigative journalism gunslinger, taking on corrupt powerful institutions when few others would.
Gibney agrees that all those films led to this. “It’s not the end of the path, but it’s definitely a distillation of the journey,” he adds of Musk.
Gibney’s viewpoint crystallizes as he adjusts little things in the edit bay, “Let’s let Trump’s voice go on longer and more distorted so it reads like it’s in Elon’s head,” during an Oval Office scene. Gibney’s predisposition to perceive the evil side of power and the powerful side of technology made him an oddity in the 2010s but made him increasingly relevant over time. He described unusual cyber risks like infecting an American water system in a conversation with this writer about his Stuxnet video Zero Days a decade ago. Recent reports of Iranian operatives seeking to do that look plausible.
“I try to tell a story that opens our eyes and makes us ask the right questions,” he says of Musk, although it could apply to many of his films.
Gibney wanted to make a film on his future rather than his past. The right-leaning podcaster and Musk buddy turned antagonist Sam Harris explains this subject at the end of the film. “We live in a world where one person’s psychopathology and neuropsychological dysregulation is translating into massive consequence in our politics, economy, and geopolitics,” he says. “It’s insane that one chaotic, unelected person has this much power.”
Gibney says such voices aren’t exaggerated and that only an American heuristic prevents us from hearing them. “People assume he’s not crazy because he’s rich,” he says. “But he may be crazy, rich, and powerful, which is terrifying. That’s the film’s warning.”
How the director sounds the alarm will be debated. Musk declined to be interviewed, calling the film a “hit piece” on X three years ago. Gibney, who never met a diss he couldn’t deadpan, replied, “How would you know?Gibney was still seeking an interview, thus the line was designed to strip and challenge. After Musk tweeted, “Gibney is a douche,” Gibney replied, “Douché,” possibly the first time a rap fight was settled with an accent aigu.
Gibney used dozens of outside sources on- and off-camera after that refusal. It produced a formal magic trick unexpected for an Oscar-winning documentarian. Gibney and his research team searched the internet for Musk audio. Next, they developed a Ready Player One-style video game avatar of Musk saying those things. The Musk avatar wanders about the globe like a traditional video game character with health bars, lives left, and colorful respawns in two first-person shooter scenes.
Gibney says, “I wouldn’t have gone there if Elon wasn’t so relentless,” explaining his decision. Gibney adds, “We’re playing with levels of reality, and the elements of the Elon Musk story are how he intends to define reality.” (The closing credits song, a bouncy original number written and performed by David Byrne, takes jagged pieces of Musk’s self-mythologizing quotes and slashes)
Gibney’s computer avatar transforms Musk into a leather-jacketed larger-than-life persona and gamifies all his objectives. Gibney believes that the world’s most powerful man can be neutralized by treating him with the same cat-with-a-ball-of-yarn disregard he shows us.
The move could backfire in a time when documentary (and nondocumentary) filmmakers are cautious of digital reproductions and AI deepfakes mixing reality and fiction. Gibney argues the amusing approach serves a greater truth: the unmasking of a man who has accumulated power by deceiving us into giving it to him. “The Great and Terrible Oz kept people in check because they were afraid of his visage that loomed over everybody, and he used that power to exert enormous amount of control,” Gibney says. “But when a little dog pulled aside the curtain, and you can see a frumpy man operating gears and levers, suddenly he wasn’t so terrible and he wasn’t so great
Gibney says, “I try to tell a story that opens our eyes and makes us ask the right questions.” He first loved Musk and proudly bought a Tesla car and solar panel installation. Photo by Jake Chessum
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Gibney offers an intriguing paradox. He lives in Maine but is a mainstay on New York’s media and entertainment social scene, walking among powerful people he often heats up. Gibney marches from sacred target to sacred target without hesitation if this has been conflicting.
The director handles the world’s weight with serious casualness. Gibney’s no-nonsense, bullshit-averse personality shows in the editing session when a performative Trump administration ally emerges, eliciting an eye-rolling and nasty remarks.
For someone who has made a career of scalping the powerful, Gibney had never considered making a documentary about Elon Musk before, and he resisted the idea when Chinese former real estate baron Zhang Xin suggested it in 2022, feeling like so much had been said and that Musk wasn’t always a force for good, remaking industries at will.
“To be honest, I was on the fence about it,” Gibney admits. But then I talked to a close friend, and he said it was a 21st-century power film, which resonated with me.”
Gibney sought early finance partners after seeing that his daily life—he was active on Twitter and had acquired Tesla solar panels—centered around the mogul and that no one was asking what this meant. Anonymous Content (Navalny), Double Agent (run by indie film veteran Dana O’Keefe and a joint venture of Black Bear Pictures and New Regency), and Zhang Xin’s Closer Media were willing to work with him.
Given the sensitivity of taking on one of the world’s most powerful men (who already saw the movie as a hit piece), the producers may have expected to finance the picture without a sales partner. But when producers released the project, they were surprised.
Companies who played it safe challenged Musk’s far-right flirting. Importantly, Netflix pursued a contract despite avoiding globally contentious issues like Jamal Khashoggi, surprise even some producers.
Gibney considered several alternatives but chose HBO’s documentary division, where he has made impactful films about Theranos and Scientology. In 2023, filmmakers inked a U.S. streaming and television rights deal with the platform. The parties broke a longstanding convention.
Ashlee Vance, author of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, says HBO stifled development of her 2015 biography in 2023 due to those hesitations. “It makes it that much more surprising this film got through.” (As Gibney illustrates in the film, imaginary Elon Musk has appeared in Iron Man, The Simpsons, and SNL.)
SNL host Elon Musk performs his monolog on Saturday, May 8, 2021 Will Heath/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images
International rights came next. Due to country-specific interests, most documentaries are sold territory by territory rather than globally. Giant global players don’t want a hassle from Croatia’s sensitivities, especially on a difficult topic.
All of which made Universal, one of the major worldwide picture distributors, demand all foreign rights surprising. This could lead to greater studio disputes and scrutiny for filmmakers than with territory buyers. Being more impactful won out.
HBO declined comment on its role. You can’t put out a movie to tens of millions of people and not want people to notice, but given Musk’s strength and desire to fight, it may be logical.
Another financier-producer is involved. Teddy Schwarzman, son of Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman, runs Black Bear. He and Musk were part of Trump delegations that visited with foreign leaders. Stephen Schwarzman calls Musk a “fascinating guy” and “good person.” His son’s readiness to fund the most high-profile Musk takedown possibly makes for an interesting Thanksgiving family gathering. Interestingly, Teddy Schwarzman did not acknowledge himself on the film. He declined comment for this piece.
HBO’s centrality intrigues. Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s parent firm, is managed by David Zaslav, a Musk associate who sits in a premium box at the U.S. Open 2 years ago. Gibney’s film was beginning. The two discussed WBD television projects at the match, according to a source. If Musk urged Zaslav to kill the film, he refused.
Given WBD management’s future, many doubts remain. When the movie hits HBO on an undisclosed date in the first half of 2027, incoming WBD owner Ellison may manage HBO, and one can’t image him being very excited by the onscreen events. In addition to Silicon Valley and Trump skepticism, Ellison’s father and key financier, Larry Ellison, is seen in text exchanges willing to airdrop Musk $2 billion to buy Twitter without questioning. Platform acquisition fees of $111 billion are not for this. Will David Ellison request changes? Stop production and make producers self-distribute? (The filmmakers unexpectedly kept paid VOD rights.) Gibney and the team are waiting. Everyone else is.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 to colonize Mars. Images by Dan Tuffs/Getty
Lost in Space A SpaceX rocket carrying Starlink satellites, adding to Musk’s vast fleet and power. Kevin Carter/Getty
What will the public and power brokers think of the film? With its dearth of criticism, Isaacson’s 2023 book sold millions despite disappointing reviewers. Gibney’s film could prove book reviewers right and spread Musk’s mistrust to the public.
The days of An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11, when documentaries change box office and public opinion, are over. Can Gibney’s movie help citizens this fall find common activism and a new town square in this post-Twitter era? Could be. Musk’s destruction of the old public commons may satisfy us enough to make his takedown the new one.
The film’s four-hour runtime might also work in its favor, giving viewers a medal of perseverance and cocktail party cred. “The thing that drives people to theaters is urgency — people feeling that they have to be part of a conversation,” says Bleecker Street CEO Kent Sanderson when the movie is released. “There’s no conversation like the one about someone who affects everyone’s life every day.”
Don’t ignore Oscar chattering class. Musk will be promoted as the best documentary, and it’s hard to see a competitor this summer. Musk’s reaction is the biggest X factor. Social media trolls are likely, but would he go further? Musk has sued boycotting Twitter advertisers and AI rival Sam Altman. He may be provoked by business hucksterism or intimate information. The film examines Musk’s personal life, including St. Clair’s nauseating details about paternity-based NDA bullying and hush payments (stealth audio from a Musk fixer churns the stomach) and her no-comment about his drug use, as well as Musk’s father’s childhood story about a family friend’s medical emergency while they were on a road trip in Musk’s native South Africa. As everyone tries to revive him, he dies. Father says young Elon reads a comic book unresponsively during the episode.
Gibney and HBO are insured, and prominent lawyers have stress-tested the picture. (Gibney bases much of the documentary on text journalists from Wired to The Wall Street Journal; the movie is a valedictory for journalism.) However, a litigious tycoon, especially today, will go after a media outlet to make a point or extract a concession.
Musk listens to U.S. President Donald Trump addresses reporters in the Oval Office on May 30, 2025. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Musk may also take a page from Scientology’s full-page New York Times ad to refute Gibney’s 2013 exposé Going Clear. It boosted viewing.
Gibney locks in during editing, keeping future sounds outside. The filmmaker changes a sequence regarding Musk’s future (humanoid robots and flinging himself off a burning planet to Mars).
“As he accretes more power, he’s no longer interested in checking his worst impulses,” Gibney says of Musk. The director recalls a reporting moment. Gibney says, “Someone who worked closely with Elon told me, ‘He’s the most miserable man I’ve ever met.’ So he’s inflicting his misery on everyone else.” The agony will continue until we discover what’s beyond Toto’s curtain.
The Musk Myth
How Hollywood portrayed the entrepreneur as a kind genius.
Iron Man 2 (2010)
A comparison of Musk and Tony Stark suggests the former inspired the latter. Musk’s statement to Robert Downey Jr. (“I have a good idea for an electric jet”) and Stark’s response (“Then we’ll make it work”) show unexpected ideas and easy execution.
The Simpsons (2015)
Musk lands in Springfield and begins building alternative energy power plants to aid humanity at his own expense. Lisa declares him “possibly the greatest living inventor,” while characters call him “an intelligence far beyond ours.”
Big Bang Theory (2015)
“It feels great to come down here and help the less fortunate,” a real Musk tells a startled Howard Wolowitz in a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving. Musk is like us—only more benevolent.
Rick and Morty (2019)
Musk plays “Elon Tusk,” a different version of himself who joins the title pair to fight Heisotron, even mentioning his kids.
Saturday Nite Live (2021)
After some cast members objected, the show let Musk (pictured above) host and gently clean up his COVID conspiracy theories, promote DOGEcoin, garner sympathy by discussing his self-reported Aspberger’s, and talk about sending people to Mars in a rocket ship.
Full Disclosure, Stevieray Hansen Has Been Banned From Platform X
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