There's a new Elon Musk 'Documentary' Coming Soon

I think the toughest decision most progressives face these days is which figure on the right they hate most. President Trump is of course the standard against which all others are judged. If you don't believe he's truly evil and that everything he does is completely wrong and destructive, can you even call yourself a Democrat? 

But starting last year Elon Musk has sometimes run a very close second. During the time when Musk was running DOGE, the opposition to him personally escalated to the point that arson and vandalism of his cars and dealerships became a daily occurrence. The goal was to destroy him financially and personally and that's still the goal for a lot of them.

So it's no surprise that there's a new 4-hour-long documentary coming out next month which is designed to catalog all of Musk's failures and flaws and credit him with nothing. According to documentarian Alex Gibney, Musk is just a clever con man. The film, called Musk, just had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The Hollywood Reporter gave it a glowing review.

With a clarity that makes his conclusions hard to refute and a wealth of visual material, spiffy graphics and insightful interviews to keep it interesting throughout the epic run time, Gibney pulls back the curtain, charting the path of the South African whiz kid, who grew up under apartheid and has never denounced the racially discriminatory regime...

Gibney paints Musk as an unabashed megalomaniac. He ventures outside the professional sphere to touch on the “legions of children,” as someone describes them; the disposable “breeders”; the drug use; and the father who seems like a nightmarish piece of work. But the gossipy tidbits almost pale next to the eye-opening shadiness of some of the business strategies.

The Tesla chapter is compelling less for the success of launching electric vehicles on the market than the more inconvenient factors that somehow went ignored — from falsehoods about the time required to swap out a battery pack to the playing down of fatalities that resulted from glitches in self-driving cars, reported to have caused at least 65 deaths.

It was only a few years ago really that the left loved Musk for his devotion to doing something about climate change and mainstreaming electric cars. But now that he's on the right, all of that has to be retconned into their current hatred for him. For instance, Tesla's Autopilot system, which is the one to which most of those 65 deaths are attributed, requires drivers to remain alert at all times. It was never intended to be used as a replacement for a human driver like the Cybercab is now. In other words, legally and in every other sense, the drivers were responsible for driving. Autopilot was just a program meant to assist in certain narrow conditions.

Also, there are more than 8 million Teslas on the road at this point and more than 40,000 Americans die in car accidents every year and more than 1 million die worldwide. Focusing in on 65 accidents involving Autopilot over a decade is really missing the forest for the trees.

The NY Times has a similar review of the film which presents Musk as a threat to democracy.

If most of what he presents here about Musk isn’t particularly new, there is a fearsome power to the way the director brings it all together. Musk isn’t just a pesky fixture in the news cycle. Gibney’s mega-portrait asks us to look at the sum of his actions and take him seriously as a threat to democracy...

Going to Mars used to be a romantic aspiration, but Gibney sees Musk as the curdling of that dream. The opening sequence takes us floating through the cosmos, where we hear a voice that sounds like Musk’s explaining his mission to understand the universe. It comes off like generic “genius” chat until he starts discussing his love of video games: “like, maybe we’re in a simulation,” an ideal version of reality created by artificial intelligence of the future.

Musk then appears as a talking head in Gibney’s film — not the living, breathing Musk, but a waxy, dead-eyed (and significantly more chiseled) A.I.-generated one whose words are drawn entirely from his past interviews and public comments.

Knowing the kind of hit piece this was going to be, Musk refused to participate in the film. So Gibney just created an AI version of Musk which uses snippets of quotes from other interviews to speak in the film. That's why I put the word "documentary" in scare quotes because AI talking heads taking comments out of context is not really how documentaries are meant to operate.

Gibney’s solution to that key absence turns out to be a stroke of creative genius. After having his team pull together a data base with every statement Musk had ever made and every interview he had ever given, the director’s digital effects crew set about developing a CG avatar to address the camera as if in a sit-down chat from a gaming chair, sticking strictly to the billionaire business mogul’s own words.

One of the actual people featured in the film is Musk's former girlfriend Ashley St. Clair, who used to be on the right but has now become a trans activist. You may recall she was in the news about a year ago complaining that Musk wasn't giving her enough money after she had his child. Musk claimed he'd given her $2.5 million plus another $500k a year, which ought to be enough to live on for most people. Anyway, she allegedly turned down a $40 million NDA in order to appear in this film. For the record, Musk has denied ever making this offer.

The Times only has one negative thing to say about the film.

I don’t love Gibney’s choice to insert abrasive video game sequences throughout the film, which gives a giddy quality to the idea of Musk’s world domination. But it’s an effective metaphor. He’s like a video game protagonist that can’t be defeated.

There are already some responses from Musk and others. To the claim that he's just a con man:

This is a pretty good con though 😂 pic.twitter.com/CetToZHCVJ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 9, 2026

Gibney spoke about the Musk that appears in his film, sticking to the idea that he hasn't really done anything praiseworthy. Here's a fact check from a Musk supporter.

Alex Gibney at Venice: reusable rockets “weren’t new,” Elon Musk “isn’t the one who does it,” and “noble cause corruption” let America elect a president whose goal is to “destroy the planet.”

Here's the fact check:

Reusable ideas are old. Shuttle. DC-X. Paper rockets from the… https://t.co/QTbU3vVIv5 pic.twitter.com/3MFO79EEVr

— Doge Tipping (@Dogetothemoon) September 8, 2026

Alex Gibney at Venice: reusable rockets “weren’t new,” Elon Musk “isn’t the one who does it,” and “noble cause corruption” let America elect a president whose goal is to “destroy the planet.”

Here's the fact check:

Reusable ideas are old. Shuttle. DC-X. Paper rockets from the ’60s. 

What wasn’t old: landing an orbital-class booster and flying it again. First time was Falcon 9, Dec 21, 2015. First reuse: 2017. Shuttle: ~$54,000/kg. Falcon 9 reusable: ~$1,500–$3,000/kg. That’s a ~90%+ collapse in the cost of getting to space. Europe and ULA said it wouldn’t work. 

Elon Musk made it work.

Yes, engineers build the hardware. Gwynne Shotwell runs the company. Tom Mueller designed the engines. 

Also true: without the person who put his last money on the line after three Falcon 1 failures and refused to treat the first stage as scrap, you get SLS and Ariane prices.

Calling Tesla/SpaceX “Enron with better PR” is lazy. Enron and Theranos sold nothing. Tesla forced the global auto industry onto EVs. 20M+ electric cars sold worldwide in 2025. ~1.2 million barrels of oil displaced per day. US CO2 from energy is still ~18–20% below 2005.

“Destroy the planet” is a sermon, not a measurement. You can argue energy policy. You cannot pretend the company that commercialized mass-market EVs and crashed launch costs is the same story as a blood-test fraud.

Gibney didn’t interview Elon. He built a 4-hour morality play and cast “the end justifies the means” as the plot. The means here were cheaper access to space and cars that don’t burn gasoline. 

The documentary is the noble cause.

It sounds like junk but you can bet it's going to be beloved by the progressives still trying to decide which figure on the right they hate the most.

Editor’s Note: Hollywood, academia, and liberal elites are out of touch with the average American.

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