Musk
In Musk, the documentary branded a “hit piece” by “free-speech absolutist” Elon Musk himself, director and journalist Alex Gibney spends four hours giving viewers an unvarnished look at the tech billionaire’s career. Exposing him as a fraud and an idea-thief multiple times in the first half, Gibney makes his stance on Musk’s supposed inventive abilities abundantly clear. He claims Musk stole Tesla from Martin Eberhard, lucked out with Zip2 (before getting pushed out), PayPal (before also getting pushed out), and has consistently failed upwards. More recently, he has spent nearly a decade calling himself the man “sending people to Mars”, despite being yet to send anyone there. Along the way, he has mutilated X (formerly Twitter) and put millions of lives at risk during his tenure in the White House.
The documentary effectively covers Musk’s hypocrisy regarding AI: initially an avid advocate for AI safety, Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 to research responsible development practices. Since then, he has launched xAI and Grok – the latter becoming notorious for its use in generating non-consensual pornographic images of women and children. This topic was one of the more well explored, with an interview with a victim of Grok (and former partner of Elon) – it felt like he wasn’t let off the hook as easily as he was for his multitude of other sins throughout. We also learn that misogyny is a common thread for Elon, and meet several of Musk’s discarded former partners (“breeders”). Where this mindset comes from is revealed in the most illuminating aspect of this whole documentary regarding Elon’s psyche: an interview with Errol Musk, his father. Although I went in knowing how objectionable a person Errol was, hearing him freely share his attitudes towards parenting, women, relationships, and race to name a few was incredibly revealing. It is almost miraculous that Elon isn’t worse – I actually felt bad for him for minute (this sympathy was short-lived). I will say I was disappointed by how little friction Errol’s opinions were met with by Gibney. I understand not saying anything during the interview in the interest of getting him to speak as openly as possible, however, because of the importance of the topics Errol was talking about, Gibney not outright condemning his views in his narration feels almost offensive.
One of the more visceral parts of the documentary covered deaths associated with Tesla vehicles’ self-driving capabilities. The central case involved Tesla’s handling of crash data: allegedly, the company concealed the fact that it had retrieved data recording the moments leading up to a fatal collision, making it considerably harder to pursue legal action. A third-party hacker was reportedly able to expose this very quickly, after which Tesla dismissed the discrepancy as just a “clumsy” mistake. Although I am glad this was covered – it did teach me something I didn’t know – I am conflicted on how tastefully I think this was done. There was actual crash footage of a man being seriously injured and a woman dying, footage which was played multiple times. I understand Gibney probably wanted to make the section as emotionally evocative and provocative as possible, but surely this could’ve just been done with a better script? Because these videos were used in court as evidence, they are publicly available, so the victims family didn’t even have the right to sign off on the inclusion. I think this epitomises the documentary’s fatal flaw: Gibney has an opinion and is desperate to spread it, but will go to any length to avoid just outright saying it himself.
The second half of the documentary focuses much more heavily on Musk’s so-called political career, particularly his leadership of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), established with the ‘aim’ of cutting the US deficit. We hear testimony from the “DOGE boys” who express little to no remorse for the harm they caused, or the lies they told, during their time in the department.
The consequences of DOGE’s cuts to USAID programmes are uniquely horrifying. The documentary suggests that the withdrawal of essential food and healthcare could contribute to nearly five million preventable deaths among children under five in Africa. We see shots of a father carry his deceased child under a blanket and families digging their own children’s graves. A shot of Musk is then shown, his own healthy child perched on his shoulders, where he declares that empathy is good only to an extent – too much of it is causing “civilisational suicide”. The juxtaposition is almost too disgusting to believe. I will say that, after some research, I found that the documentary presents the number of deaths/lives affected misleadingly; the statistics are projections, not actual occurrences. This was needlessly confusing: the point would’ve been just as effective without this attempt to potentially overstate the impact.
The glaring problem with the documentary is the interview with ‘Elon’. Because Musk refused to be interviewed, Gibney and his team use an AI-generated avatar of him, trained on his past public statements and audio interviews. While spending much of the film critiquing Musk’s use of, and attitude towards, artificial intelligence, Gibney employs an AI-generated Elon Musk as its narrative throughline. It is a remarkably odd creative choice, and the irony is not lost on the viewer.
Moreover, Gibney, despite vocally positioning himself as staunchly anti-Musk, never really delves into the why of anything. He presents an extraordinary amount of information, makes subtle implications, and allows his interviewees to do much of the condemning, without ever offering much in the way of his own interpretation. I suppose one could argue that this is good journalism, allowing the facts to speak for themselves. But when covering subjects as serious as those explored here, I think such restraint is irresponsible. There comes a point when refusing to actively condemn is not so much objectivity as an avoidance of moral judgement.
