What would you think if I said that the world’s most dangerous man lives just outside Austin in a compound surrounded by dozens of women he has impregnated and a cadre of enforcers and fixers? You’re probably thinking of some Jim Jones wannabe with chemical weapons, but as Alex Gibney argues in his new documentary, that title may well go to the subject of the aptly titled Musk.
The one truth about Elon Musk is that, if he’s talking about a subject, then he sounds like a genius. Unless you know something about that topic and then he sounds like he’s floundering in a sea of BS. The tell is when he looks up and starts winking his left eye, and during the four hours of Musk, that happens a lot. The distinction between a lie and BS is significant, a distinction pointed out by one of the documentary’s dozens of sources and talking heads who have been caught in Musk’s wake and discarded after seeing his true nature. A lie is deliberate. BS is just a flood of gibberish, and it’s quickly clear that’s what has been Musk’s stock-in trade for decades.
Even at four hours, Gibney can’t really get into everything; he barely touches on the cultlike adoration of Musk in IT and business. It’s still impressive what he gets in, from obvious subjects like SpaceX to his increasingly ugly relationship with Grimes (remember that?) and of course, the many crimes of Tesla. Or, as Cory Doctorow describes it, a demon-haunted car. Suitable, as “demon” is a term that recurs in multiple contexts.
Gibney starts gently, slowly undercutting the myth of Musk the great engineer and the great businessman. It almost seems like a trap: The self-described Tesla founder famously rejected Gibney’s invite to take part in the film by calling the director a douche. The image of Musk that initially emerges is only slightly harsher than the average glowing profile and it’s only in part 2 – denoted by a much appreciated 10-minute intermission – that he really gets deep into the terrifying psychopathology of Musk.
That shift is so incremental that it takes almost two and a half hours for Musk’s daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, to speak aloud the word that’s been on the tip of everyone’s tongue: fascist. Most terrifying is the ending implication about what’s next. In hindsight, rather than using it for the soundtrack to Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Gibney should have saved Tom Waits’ “What’s He Building?” for Musk. Its sinister refrain is even more apt as the outline of Musk’s massive data gathering operation starts to take shape.
Much of Musk’s nature is explained by former business partners and ex-lovers. They’d normally be easy to write off as merely disgruntled, but when they all tell basically the same story – a variant on their wish that they’d protected themselves sooner – their accounts become brush strokes in a hideous portrait. Its subject: a nihilist who has conned many people, maybe even himself included, into believing he’s an idealist, his every vainglorious utterance treated with unearned reverence by everyone from the Silicon Valley press to the king of the credulous, Joe Rogan, and the cackling hyenas of the All-In podcast.
In contrast, Gibney details how exceptionally thin-skinned the Wired cover star turned Wall Street Journal darling turned international political power player is. Gibney also exposes his narcissism, consistently trying to BS his version of the future into existence. Insightful voices – mostly people who have been burned by him and reporters who have tried to fathom the mystery of his success – all come back to the same idea that his most valuable asset has always been that cocky self-assurance Silicon Valley so often mistakes for actual ability.
Gibney’s failure is in sometimes getting too cute, like having a bad AI-generated version of Musk spout selected quotes, or his reliance on a GTA-esque video game to show the evisceration of so many government agencies through DOGE. When that anti-democratic wrecking ball is unleashed, Gibney uses it to dismantle the raw hypocrisy of a man whose company has been on the government teat for decades who then devastates government programs that actually do some good. Thanks, Obama. No, literally, since Gibney makes clear how much of the political carnage we currently face came from Musk’s seeming terror at letting Biden-era investigations into his businesses’ government contracts and safety records. Seemingly exhaustive as Musk may be, it could benefit from an accompanying volume on what fault in our society allowed such an obvious flim-flam artist to become so powerful.
Musk
2026, R, 235 min. Directed by Alex Gibney.
This article appears in October 16 • 2026.
