Alex Gibney made a four-hour movie about Elon Musk without Elon Musk in it, and that turns out to be the point. The film, titled simply 'Musk,' is less a biography than an alarm bell — one Gibney has been ringing loudly since it premiered out of competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 8, 2026. Gibney has called Musk 'very dangerous' to the future of democracy, and the movie is built to make you agree with him.
This is not a neutral documentary and it does not pretend to be. Gibney's whole approach dares Musk to punch back. Musk obliged, on his own platform, within days.
The film traces Musk from the dot-com boom through Tesla and SpaceX to his acquisition of Twitter and his growing footprint in American politics. Its central question is blunt: how did an unelected businessman come to wield this much influence over public debate, political movements and government policy? Gibney doesn't pose the question rhetorically. He treats it as a problem to be solved by the audience, after the credits.
The AI Musk who never agreed to talk
Musk declined to sit for an interview. So Gibney built one. A CGI avatar of Musk, driven by AI voice syncing, delivers statements Musk made in real interviews elsewhere. It's a gimmick that could have played as cheap. Instead it lands as commentary — the most powerful man in the American tech-political complex, reduced to a puppet reading back his own words.
Musk noticed. In a series of posts on X, he called the film a 'hit piece that misses' and, gesturing at its runtime, 'boring af'. His attorney Alex Spiro sent a legal warning to Gibney and Jigsaw Productions, arguing that Musk's team had tried to provide his side and been ignored. 'This project did not begin as an inquiry,' Spiro wrote. 'It began with a conclusion'.
Gibney's response has been the response of someone who has been sued before and knows the drill. He says the film went through extensive fact-checking and legal review, and that Musk's absence didn't stop the team from working the public record and interviewing people from across his life and career. Translation: come and try.
A documentary that wants a response, not a review
The angle that separates 'Musk' from every other billionaire postmortem is the one Gibney keeps returning to in interviews: this is a film that wants the audience to do something. Not tweet. Not sigh. Something. The most concrete alarm in the movie concerns government data accessed during Musk's period leading the Department of Government Efficiency, which Gibney warns could be paired with AI to influence the U.S. midterm election in November. That's not a historical claim. That's a countdown.
Which is why the timing matters. Bleecker Street releases the film theatrically in the United States on October 9, 2026. Weeks before the midterms. This isn't accidental scheduling. A documentary built around the argument that a private citizen has captured chunks of the American state is being dropped into theaters at the exact moment voters are being asked to weigh in on that state.
There is a version of this film that would have been safer. A tidier profile. Some balance, some boardroom access, a redemptive final act about Mars. Gibney didn't make that film. He made the one where the subject sends lawyers before the popcorn is popped.
Whether 'Musk' moves anyone to resistance is a question the movie itself can't answer. What it can do — what four hours and a CGI ghost and a legal threat and a pre-election release date collectively insist on — is refuse to let Musk be background noise. You can call that activism. You can call it a hit piece. Musk already did. Either way, the film is a wager: that the cult around the richest man in the world is thinner than it looks, and that a documentary, of all things, can put a finger through it.
