Elon Musk reclaimed his status as the world’s only trillionaire this week, thanks to an uptick in the value of SpaceX shares. Given the stock market's whims, he may return to being a centibillionaire within a few days.
Either way, Musk has more money than anyone could spend in a lifetime — enough to build several hundred stealth bombers or provide clean water and basic sanitation to every person on the planet for years to come. It’s difficult to comprehend just how wealthy Musk is using ordinary metrics. But a new documentary urges us to consider how he acquired this unprecedented fortune — and the power that comes with it — in the first place.
Directed by Alex Gibney, Musk is a scathing portrait of a high-tech con man who bullshitted his way to untold wealth and built a cult of personality around his supposed genius while relying on government largesse to prop up his faltering businesses. Contemplating Musk’s rise, Gibney is reminded of The Man Who Could Work Miracles, a 1937 movie about a man who is given absolute power by the gods.
“Why had we given it to Musk?” he wonders.
Nearly four hours long, the sprawling film provides an exhaustive overview of Musk’s life, from his childhood in apartheid South Africa to his early years in Silicon Valley, where he proved adept at failing upward (making nearly $200 million after getting fired from PayPal) — but impressed few colleagues with his technical skills. (He was known for creating tangled bundles of code called “hairballs.”)
It details the growth of companies like Tesla, which became a favorite of Wall Street even as Musk made dangerously hyperbolic claims about the car’s safety. It also details his bizarre personal life — including his pro-natalist urge to father a “legion” of children for an impending civil war. The second half of the documentary traces his rightward political shift, his ideologically driven takeover of Twitter, and his disastrous alliance with Donald Trump — a partnership that led to the decimation of USAID, inflicted needless suffering and death on the world’s poorest people, and imperiled the future of American democracy. Musk spent nearly $300 million to get Trump elected in 2024, but as Musk makes clear, the spending was worth it — if only to kill dozens of federal investigations into his companies.
The People vs. Elon Musk
Musk opens in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, and nationwide October 16, just a few weeks before election day — which is all the more reason to see it as soon as you can. With a run time that rivals Gone With the Wind (and a far less attractive protagonist), Musk is not an easy watch. But it is essential viewing for anyone whose life is affected by his various business and political endeavors — which is to say, pretty much everyone on planet Earth.
Much of the information in Musk has been reported before, but the film also includes some bombshell allegations. Former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair shares text messages Musk sent her on election night in 2024, which she interprets as evidence of electoral manipulation. In the final minutes of the film, Gibney implies that Musk could use the data he gleaned during his destructive DOGE tenure to rig future elections.
“It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” says Geoffrey Hinton, a leading AI expert, in the film. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.”
Gibney assembles his evidence with the meticulous zeal of a prosecutor. The film includes horrific dash-cam footage from the scene of a fatal accident involving a Tesla in self-driving mode. According to the film, at least 60 people have died as a result of accidents involving Teslas in “autopilot” mode, a feature Musk promoted with hyperbolic claims and a notorious video that was allegedly staged to make it seem like the cars could safely drive themselves (which also appears in the film).
Musk declined to participate in the documentary, so Gibney created an “interview” with his subject using a lifelike digital avatar synced with actual audio recordings -- a controversial creative choice that the filmmaker says was inspired by Musk’s belief that reality is a simulation.
Gibney has enlisted a formidable set of witnesses in the case against Musk, scoring interviews with many people who can attest to his character (or lack thereof), including journalists like Kara Swisher and Zoe Schiffer. Martin Eberhard, who co-founded Tesla but was pushed out by Musk and largely erased from the company’s history, says he learned the hard way that “there’s no legal definition of ‘founder.’”
Podcaster Sam Harris, a former friend, details their COVID-era falling out and laments that “we are living in a world where one person’s psychopathology and neuropsychological dysregulation is translating into massive consequences in our politics.” Musk’s cartoon villain of a father, Errol, issues a stark warning: “Elon is just like me. Do not bet against Elon; you are going to lose.”
Believe Women — Especially When They’re Talking About Elon Musk
The most devastating testimony of the film comes from a pair of women who were once Musk’s intimate partners: Justine Wilson Musk, the tech mogul’s first ex-wife and mother of six of his children; and St. Clair, the influencer who gave birth to Musk’s son Romulus in 2024.
Justine Musk opens up about the collapse of their marriage, the death of their infant son, Nevada, and her husband’s vicious misogynist streak. She recalls Musk telling her, “I’m the alpha in this relationship,” and suggests he learned how to speak to women from his father. She also discusses Musk’s cruelty toward their eldest daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, who is trans. Musk, who has publicly claimed that his “son” was “killed by the woke mind virus,” also cut off Vivian’s health insurance, according to Justine. “Elon never tried to repair things” with her, she says.
St. Clair provides damning information about his relationships with the women who have borne his increasingly large brood of children and are reportedly referred to as “breeders” by his inner circle. St. Clair alleges that Musk slashed her child support payments after she publicly named him as the father of her child, and that his fixer, Jared Birchall, made harassing phone calls to her during her postpartum period. (She shares one such recording in the film.) By St. Clair’s account, Musk was particularly cruel to ex-girlfriend Grimes, a.k.a. Clarie Boucher, the singer with whom he has three children. He took their son X — reportedly his favorite child — on the campaign trail with him in 2024 over Grimes’s objections, then blocked her messages.
“He took that damn baby from her,” St. Clair says. (Shivon Zilis, who has four children with Musk but did not participate in the film, recently shared details about their breakup on social media, bolstering the idea that he views these women as expendable.)
Such salacious details about Musk’s bizarre personal life might seem insignificant compared to the harm he’s inflicted on the world through his rapacious quest for global domination. But it matters that he treats his own family, particularly the women who gave him the children he purports to love, with such evident contempt.
Sending a Message at the Box Office
Gibney is one of the most fearless investigative filmmakers working today. In a career spanning decades, he has taken on the Church of Scientology, Enron, Theranos scammer Elizabeth Holmes, the use of torture by American intelligence, and sex abuse in the Catholic Church. If there’s a common theme connecting his documentaries, it’s how certain individuals manage to gain extraordinary power over others, and why they frequently decide to abuse it.
Yet even by Gibney’s standards, Musk represents perilous terrain. Going up against the richest man in the world — and his lawyers — is no small feat. Musk has already threatened to sue Gibney over a claim about the role his “space lasers” may have played in the 2024 election.
The film is one of several projects critical of the tech oligarchy coming out this fall, including The Social Reckoning and Artificial. But as a non-fiction film that draws heavily from journalistic accounts — rather than a fictionalized interpretation of real events — Musk has stronger potential to shift public sentiment.
That is, if enough people see it. It’s not guaranteed that widespread antipathy for Musk will translate to big audiences for the documentary, which Gibney has spent nearly four years making. Musk’s tech bro buddies, who increasingly control the media, may also attempt to blunt the impact of the film
After a theatrical run this fall, Musk is supposed to air on HBO early next year, but with David Ellison now in control of the network (and reportedly looking to Musk for financing the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger), that release could very well be in jeopardy. Universal has reportedly gotten cold feet about distributing the film overseas, and Musk's producers say they were barred from advertising the film on X and TikTok because it was deemed “political” content.
A strong box office performance for Musk would be a show of support for hard-hitting investigative documentaries at a time when we desperately need them. So even if you think you know everything there is to know about Musk, vote with your wallet and buy a ticket to see this film whenever you can. Just be sure to bring some snacks, anti-nausea medication, and a strong sense of moral outrage.
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian
I don't know, 4 hours in a dark room with Musk sounds like a nightmare.