‘Musk’ Doc Is Important But Maybe Pointless

The short story is that the new Alex Gibney documentary Musk is a well written and produced film that just adds lots — nearly four hours worth — of detail to what most of us already know: Elon Musk is a monster. Sadly, nobody who needs to see this will ever watch it. At four hours, there is likely zero chance that anyone who still supports Musk will even give it a hate watch, much less watch it with an open mind.

To be clear, not everybody has been aware of Musk for as long as I have, back when he sold his second company to PayPal. But that is because I was working for the publications of Business Journals Inc. in Boston as a technology business journalist, from the late 1990s until 2012. And I’ve been paying attention to all the terrible things he has been doing on social media since before he bought Twitter.

So, for me, Musk is just four hours of adding extra detail to what I already know about him. There are some real revelations, but mostly about some of the people closest to Elon Musk, particularly the mothers of his children.

If you are not as aware of what kind of a monster Musk is as I am, is this film worth watching? Sure, if you can take the four-hour length and, more importantly, can handle the existential dread that will result from 232 minutes of relentless examples of inhumanly evil behavior by the richest man on the planet. Yes, this film needs a content warning for almost every one of those 232 minutes.

There are some things about Musk that I really don’t like, despite thinking it is a very well-made film. Gibney uses “AI” for some aspects in the movie, although it is clear that it was made with gen”AI” and actually is a meta statement about Musk and his “AI” efforts with xAI and Grok. Still, that’s akin to when Elvis Costello used the “n” word in the song “Oliver’s Army” — I get why it made sense but it is still something that is inherently wrong.

Also, using one of Musk’s “baby mamas,” Ashley St. Clair, so much to describe what he was doing during the lead up to and during DOGE, is a questionable choice. It isn’t until well into that part of documentary that Gibney lets us know that she was, when she met Musk, working for the Christian Nationalist hate organization Babylon Bee. She eventually states that she “was” in the extreme right wing, implying she is no longer, but never clearly states she no longer holds those odious beliefs. Certainly, Gibney would never have had access to so many insider communications if he didn’t use her to tell so much of the story of Musk, but it still smells a bit of letting her try to wash herself of her sins.

Ultimately, I think everybody who can stomach it should watch Musk. But, assuming Elon Musk doesn’t use his “10,000 lasers in space” to prevent a Blue Wave from taking over Congress in three weeks, this really needs to be the report of a Special Prosecutor’s office that puts Elon Musk in prison for the rest of his life. To Gibney’s credit, Musk is a documentary and not a political call to action, so it might be just as likely to leave some voters with a sense of futility in the face of a once trillionaire who wants to install a fully authoritarian government in the United States as it might be to get voters angry enough to make that Blue Wave happen.

I’m not going to give Musk (Bleecker Street Films; R; 3hrs 52mins) a rating because I think it is too important a piece of political information for that.

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