MUSK: 3 STARS. “a story of excess; of money, of power, of ideas, of children.”
SYNOPSIS: Clocking in at almost four hours, “Musk” is a comprehensive, uncompromising and unauthorized look at the life and times of the world’s richest man.
CAST: Elon Musk, Justine Musk, Ashley St. Clair, Kara Swisher, Zoë Schiffer, Martin Eberhard, Geoffrey Hinton. Directed by Alex Gibney.
REVIEW: Exhaustive but not exhausting, the 235-minute documentary is everything you ever wanted to know about Elon Musk but were afraid to ask.
Made without Musk’s co-operation, the film’s subject appears only in archival footage, through exchanges between Musk and Gibney on the X platform and as a CGI avatar.
There’s no shortage of firsthand sources, however. Gibney corals a variety of people, from Musk’s first wife Justine and financial analyst Lawrence Fossi to right-wing influencer and Musk baby-mama Ashley St. Clair (who, in a bombshell revelation, suggests Musk left Trump’s 2024 election get-together early because he already knew what the results would be) and author Cory Doctorow, to shed light on an enigmatic man, shaped by a tumultuous apartheid-era South Africa upbringing.
Divided into two parts (yes, there is a pee break midway), it’s a portrait of Musk as a disciplined wildcard, a self-mythologizer who transforms from successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur to power broker at the highest levels of government, technology and media.
Gibney suggests Musk’s disruptive influence, through a massive $288–290 million donation in the 2024 election cycle to support the Republican Party, his take-over of Twitter (now X) and rejection of legacy business models, has radically reshaped business and democratic norms but not for the better.
The slickly edited doc is framed as a story of excess, of money, of power, of ideas, of children (Musk has at least 14 children). As portrayed, the sheer scope of Musk’s influence is alarming, and Gibney digs deep,
Trouble is, while there is a lot of information, there’s nothing really new, no bombshell revelations to justify the lengthy runtime.
