‘Musk’ Review: Alex Gibney Examines How the World’s Richest Man Turned His Lack of Empathy Into a Political Weapon

There’s a familiar Elon Musk pronouncement that Alex Gibney uses as one of the central ideas, and something of a formal pretext, for his documentary portrait of the eccentric billionaire now widely considered the richest person in the world. Musk has repeatedly suggested that there’s a good chance our present-day existence is nothing more than a simulation created by some future artificial intelligence. It’s one of those statements that sounds part provocation, part grandiose speculation, and, as people like to assume, perhaps a glimpse into the privileged knowledge available to someone at his level. Musk presents it as a way of explaining how he sees reality. To me, though, it sounds more like a convenient psychological justification for denying it altogether: a way of behaving as if nothing he does has real consequences.

Over the course of four hours, Alex Gibney examines the life, achievements and assorted derangements of this peculiar and increasingly dangerous figure. The film doesn’t follow a chronological structure, but it does spend some time on Musk’s childhood in South Africa, where his father, an unapologetic racist, recalls that Elon spent most of his days playing video games. He also tells a particularly revealing story about an acquaintance who was dying. While the adults around him were desperately trying to revive the man or struggling with the distressing situation, young Elon simply carried on playing his games. One gets the impression that, in a sense, he has never stopped. He has spent his adult life manipulating other human beings as though they were NPCs (non-player characters) in a video game, with himself as the only person holding the controller.

That psychological disconnect eventually hardened into something resembling an outright rejection of empathy, allowing Musk to operate as he does today. But the increasingly unhinged, seemingly out-of-orbit version of Musk we’ve seen in recent years needed a few additional ingredients to unleash the monster that had either remained hidden for so long or that he hadn’t fully acknowledged himself. The turning point came with the combination of the pandemic, its restrictions and lockdowns, and the rise of the anti-woke rhetoric that gained momentum around the same time. Covid restrictions hurt him financially, but they seem to have affected him even more deeply on a psychological level. At some point, he began consuming his own algorithmically tailored propaganda and radicalized in the process. Even more consequential, according to the film, was the gender transition of one of his children, whom Musk effectively declared dead after she came out as a woman. From then on, the eccentric inventor behind satellites, spacecraft and electric cars, the billionaire entrepreneur given to spectacular business gambles, and the flamboyant father of an ever-growing number of children began to fade into the background. What emerged instead was something considerably uglier.

Musk is a portrait of a man who can only be described as dangerous, assembled through a combination of conventional documentary techniques and some more deliberately provocative devices. Given the nature of its subject, Gibney makes extensive use of artificial intelligence and video game aesthetics to construct parts of the narrative. Statements Musk made in interviews are occasionally delivered by a virtual Elon, an AI-generated version of the billionaire. It’s a way of giving voice to his ideas and pronouncements, particularly since Musk refused to participate in the documentary and publicly opposed its production. Gibney also borrows familiar video game scenarios to illustrate some of Musk’s activities, especially his increasingly direct involvement in politics. He is presented as a player navigating a virtual world, eliminating enemies without hesitation in the sort of simulation that, apparently, Musk himself believes reality to be.

Across its four-hour running time, the documentary covers Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink, the ups and downs of Musk’s various business ventures, and his early feuds with other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. It also delves into his rather unconventional personal life, featuring several of his former partners and the mothers of some of his 13 acknowledged children (the actual number is believed to be higher), along with relatives and former friends who eventually distanced themselves from him. But the really disturbing material comes in the second half, when the public figure we’ve come to know in recent years fully takes over. Donald Trump enters the picture as Musk’s political patron and gateway to power in Washington; there’s his acquisition of Twitter, its transformation into X and his increasingly blatant manipulation of the platform’s algorithms; his disastrous stint with DOGE, supposedly aimed at reducing US government spending; and, of course, the rather pathetic cameo by Argentina’s president Javier Milei, complete with the now-infamous chainsaw that Musk himself turned into a political prop.

It’s not particularly difficult to trace the connections between Musk, Milei and the broader movement they have helped popularize, with Trump as its most visible figurehead. The intellectual bankruptcy, the lack of empathy, the megalomania, the aggression and the sheer belligerence: these are shared characteristics that transcend national borders. Unlike Milei, at least Musk has a genuine talent for business, although even that is a claim Gibney puts under scrutiny. Much of Musk’s wealth and reputation, the filmmaker argues, rests on his ability to bullshit people, selling them grand promises that are frequently exaggerated, misleading or simply never fulfilled. He backs up that accusation with a number of examples and anecdotes that cast considerable doubt on the mythology surrounding Musk’s entrepreneurial genius.

For all its manipulations and its occasionally rather Muskian flourishes in the way it uses technology and visual effects, Musk ultimately delivers a frightening, deeply depressing portrait of a man whose power and influence over so much of our lives have become almost unbearable to contemplate. Perhaps the titans of industry were always this grotesque and destructive, even before the age of social media. The difference is that we didn’t have to watch them constantly expose themselves, broadcasting their most pathetic thoughts, their vulgarity, racism and cruelty for everyone to see. Today, they do it all in public, often seemingly without the slightest awareness of how they come across. Gibney’s film confronts us with a figure straight out of George Lucas’s imagination when he conceived the villains of Star Wars: powerful, unrestrained, capricious men willing to destroy just about anything to protect their own interests. In that respect, and in several others, reality seems to have outdone fiction.