By the time Alex Gibney and I sat down at the Ausonia Hungaria in Venice, he had spent the better part of the past four years trying to make sense of Elon Musk. The result is Musk, a nearly four-hour documentary that attempts to reckon with the extraordinary—and increasingly political—power accumulated by the Tesla and SpaceX tech billionaire.
“In some ways it’s a bleak moment now,” Gibney says while sipping a cappuccino. “We’ve allowed these people to gain so much power. And they did it in broad daylight while we were all watching.”
Now it’s just a few hours before the incredibly comprehensive, painstakingly researched film premieres at Venice’s 83rd film festival. Gibney, 72—the Oscar-winning documentarian who brought us 2015’s Going Clear, which went deep into the world of Scientology, and 2019’s The Inventor, about Elizabeth Holmes—has a reputation for piercing critiques of his subjects, and Musk pulls no punches in its attempt to depict SpaceX founder as the fraud Gibney believes him to be.
Musk himself declined to participate, despite Gibney’s efforts to interview him, and has dismissed the film as a “hit piece.” Instead, Gibney builds his portrait from interviews with his first ex-wife, novelist Justine Musk, with whom he has five children, and ex-lover Ashley St. Clair, mother to one of Musk’s children. At the Venice press conference for Musk, St. Clair revealed that she had turned down a $40 million NDA from Musk after giving birth to their child last year, which enabled her to appear in Gibney’s film. (Gibney says he also reached out to Grimes, electronic musician and mother of three of Musk’s children, but she declined to participate).
He singles out St. Clair, a former MAGA influencer Musk met on his website X, as “fascinating because she’s super smart and super funny.” But despite their dynamism, the film shows that Musk eventually tires of them. “All these women were entranced and enchanted with Elon early on. As soon as they have children, they’re not interesting except as…,” Gibney stops to quote Justine Musk’s own terminology from his film: “breeders.”
Gibney’s film gives the women more humanity and dimension than Musk himself seems to have. St. Clair details her world colliding with Musk’s as a mutual experience: At the time they met, she had been a conservative influencer, and her connections to that world were relationships that Musk would later leverage. In one of the most explosive moments of the film, St. Clair suggests that Musk interfered with the 2024 election, recalling that he left the Mar-a-Lago celebration early and later told her he knew it would go in Trump’s favor. She says that Musk had a “degree of certainty” about the results before they came in that “I had never seen before.” And told him she didn’t want to know more because she didn’t want to be “deposed,” to which, according to St. Clair, Musk replied that she was wise.
Justine and St. Clair aren’t the only talking heads included in the film. Musk includes extended interviews with tech journalist Kara Swisher, Musk’s former friend Sam Harris, and former United States ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, as well as dozens of former associates and employees at Tesla, Spacex, and DOGE, and, in the most surprising move, an AI-generated rendering of Musk trained on the hundreds of hours of footage of him that exists in the world.
“The whole idea of the avatar came because, of course, he wouldn’t give an interview. So how do you render him? And we wanted access to as much interview material as possible, which would include podcasts, some of which are visualized, some of which are not,” says Gibney. “So then how do you visualize that?”
The film’s scope is deliberately expansive, moving from Musk’s childhood and the death of his infant son, Nevada, to his transformation into one of the world’s most consequential technology executives and the richest man in the history of the world. Gibney’s not-quite-linear biopic traces Musk’s business, technological, personal, and political evolution, including a deep dive into his full-throated embrace of Donald Trump. From his childhood in South Africa and getting beat up by other kids at school, to his quest to create a legion of children, Gibney’s doc explores the human that may have always been lurking behind the blustering meme obsessed tech autocrat.
Paraphrasing Robert Caro, the famous biographer, Gibney says he sought to answer the questions “Does power corrupt? What does power reveal?” Gibney’s film posits that maybe Musk was always this way, and rather than changing over time, the wealth he amassed has simply shown what’s always been there. “The more power Elon gained, did that reveal something about his essential character?”
Gibney tells Vanity Fair that, before Musk’s turn to President Trump, the doc was going to be two hours. But after Musk donated nearly $300 milion to help smooth the pathway to Trump’s second term and was appointed to spearhead the now defunct Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he knew he had to extend it.
“Obviously things changed with the election. We were almost done,” he says. “But then the more we thought about it, you needed to understand the how and the why of the corruption. And so to do that, you have to tell a longer story.”
For Gibney, the Musk story also has echoes of one of his previous subjects: Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes has a buzzy documentary of her very own coming out, which premiered with a splash at Telluride this weekend, and follows Holmes in the weeks before her prison sentence. While chatting about the project directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, Gibney tells me that he believes there are similarities between Musk and Holmes, specifically in the way that he bent the truth to serve his impulses. But Gibney’s also quick to point out that Musk has the crucial distinction of presiding over companies filled with highly qualified engineers and executives.
“Unlike Elizabeth Holmes, who made a machine that didn’t work at all, you can drive a Tesla and a lot of people love them,” says Gibney. But still, Gibney believes that Musk is a snake oil salesman, comparing him to Harold Hill from The Music Man. “His great genius is the stock pumping, and that’s what the guys at Enron did,” Gibney adds. “That’s what, in her own way, Elizabeth Holmes did. The idea that they create this fantasy that people are willing to invest in.”
Below, I chat with Alex Gibney about all things Musk—his family life, his expert “bullshitting,” and whether Gibney thinks Musk will ever really get to Mars. Vanity Fair has reached out to Musk for comment.
Vanity Fair: Pulling off Musk was a huge challenge due to Elon’s lack of participation. How did you compile all the footage?
Alex Gibney: In a way, we engaged him. We just didn’t engage him in the chair. It’s like coming upon found footage because he had this massive record of saying stuff. He’s not shy about talking. You hope when you sit down with somebody for an interview that what they say will be revelatory, that they’ll be honest and generous with their thoughts and reveal something about themselves. But as revealed by Musk’s own comments, he has a confective personality. To have interviewed Elon Musk back in the early days may have been more interesting. And indeed, one of our producers worked with him on a film called The Revenge of the Electric Car and knew him then and very much liked him, but he’s now become a character. He says the same things over and over and over again, as if reiterating on a script.
I’d love to hear about the digital rendering of Musk that answered questions in the film. Did you use AI?
I have a sort of a history of that. In a film I did called Client 9 about Eliot Spitzer, I found the most important escort and I interviewed her, but she didn’t want to be on camera. So I hired an actress named Wrenn Schmidt to perform [her interview]. In the film I did called Zero Days about the attempts by the US and Israel to undermine Iran’s program. We had three sources going inside the NSA, but they might have been put in jail. So we confected another kind of avatar.
In order to figure out [Musk’s] rendering, we worked with this [AI forward design and animation team] called MakeMake. And we came up with some visualizations, putting Musk in a gamer’s chair. There’s a kind of cyberpunk color scheme in the film that we engaged in, so we had the image and then we used AI in order to be able to sync it to picture. The more we understood about the story, the more we thought it was important that the theme of AI was also very important in the film. So we use some AI tools, but in the service of our thematic and aesthetic agenda.
What are your personal feelings on AI use and film?
My personal feelings about AI are a little bit more nuanced than “AI is awful.” AI is a technology and it’s computing power, really, if you boil it down. The thing that I find disturbing is what we’re allowing people with a lot of power to do with AI…the tech bro is saying, “We’re helpless against the technology. And it just so happens that the technology is allowing us to accrete universal power and to put everybody else on the planet out of work. Oh, well.” [laughs]
Musk presents moments where the audience could empathize with Elon—the death of his child, Nevada, his own violent childhood in South Africa. And yet there always seems to be a disconnect with Musk. Why do you think that is?
It’s clear that he experienced some kind of trauma as a kid, but over time, is he reenacting that trauma on the rest of us? Is that how it’s working? That kind of thing can become an excuse.
He’s developed this also very elaborate philosophy called “long-termism,” which is basically the idea that you favor outcomes in the future because there’ll be far more people in the future than there are in the present. So that allows a rationalization for a level of cruelty that otherwise would be unimaginable. He can pretend that he can rationalize that he’s doing it for the good of the planet. “I have to be cruel because I’m saving the planet.” Does that then also feather into an extraordinarily narcissistic personality? I’m not a psychologist, but [I think] yes. This goes to the heart of his gaslighting. As he created more power, he was creating a world of reality around him, but that world of reality was also a world of unreality. [Musk thinks] we’re living in a video game. Does it really matter if I fire 80% of the people at Twitter? Does it really matter if I destroy the US government? It’s a game in which he is player one.
Musk is four hours long. Did you ever consider breaking it up as a miniseries rather than a two-part film?
It did evolve. Prior to him linking up with Trump, we were prepared to do a two-hour movie. But then it seemed like we needed to go further. The whole idea was to reframe the biography of Musk. There are certain beats that people are familiar with: the rockets, Tesla. But to reframe the story and to see it in its breadth is to understand it most fully. So for that, we needed length.
Who do you think has done more damage to society: Trump or Elon?
Well, you almost can’t separate them at this point because as Elon himself says, “I’m not sure Trump is elected without Elon.” There’s a moment in the film, I can’t remember the exact quote, that’s essentially like Trump needed Musk’s money to stay in power and Musk needed Trump’s power to stay in the money. It’s a mutual dependence relationship. But you have to think about the fact that Musk is always talking about saving the planet. Well, you just elected so
