Review
Musk
review – epic study of the world’s richest and most banal man
Venice
film festival: Alex Gibney interviews former colleagues, wives, the
trillionaire’s father and a CG avatar in this absorbing documentary
Peter
Bradshaw
Peter
Bradshaw in Venice
Tue 8 Sep
2026 14.32 CEST
‘Elon is
a nuke.” The speaker is Ashley St Clair, a former conservative Maga influencer
and one of Elon Musk’s former girlfriends-slash-baby mommas.
She is a
fascinating expert witness in Alex Gibney’s four-hour epic study of the world’s
richest and dullest man: the overgrown brattish South-African-born trillionaire
plutocrat, ersatz visionary and Trump courtier who owns Tesla cars, SpaceX
rocket ships, Starlink satellites on which nation states’ military capabilities
are increasingly reliant, X (formerly Twitter) which shapes the collective
“incel” id of billions and GrokAI whose vast server farms daily guzzle oceans
of precious water.
As head
of Trump’s incompetent cost-cutting Doge (Department of Government Efficiency)
unit, Musk actually increased the US deficit by sacking thousands of revenue
officers whose job was to rake in tax – while reportedly accessing and
improperly sharing Americans’ sensitive social security data.
He does
indeed look like a nuke, efficiently designed, destructive, seemingly unguided
and uncontrolled.
Gibney’s
excellent film covers a lot of ground in its extraordinary story, although we
don’t get to hear about the mysterious process that changed a balding youngster
into a follicularly unchallenged mature man.
Musk is a
uniquely disquieting baseball-capped figure, grinning and giggling and smirking
on a thousand sycophantic podcasts like a modern, hyper-evolved version of
Anthony Trollope’s wealthy charlatan Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now.
But given Musk’s boyish love of space travel and sci-fi, Gibney wittily
compares him to the hero of the 1936 film version of HG Wells’s The Man Who
Could Work Miracles about godlike space aliens who capriciously confer
supernatural powers on a banal, ordinary earthling.
Gibney
doesn’t get to talk to Musk (or Trump) though in the spirit of Musk’s AI
interests, he creates a photorealistic CG avatar who mouths all the things the
man himself is reported as saying (a rather contrived visual joke, actually,
which the film didn’t need). He speaks to many professional colleagues, and to
Musk’s formidably opinionated father Errol Musk who fills us in on Elon’s
formative years in the tense world of South Africa in which young Musk was
bullied and beaten up.
Gibney
speaks to Musk’s first wife Justine Musk (née Wilson), a passionate and
intelligent woman who tells us about the tragedy of one of their infant
children dying of Sids and then the hurt she felt when Elon felt the need to
grandstand about this on social media, claiming the child had died in his arms
(it was her arms, she says). And given that heart-wrenching death, how crass it
was for him to announce later on social media that his trans daughter had
“died” of “woke mind virus”. Much later, Musk showed a creepy enthusiasm for
procreating many children with various women; Musk reportedly built compounds
for his extended families like something from The Handmaid’s Tale.
Back in
the 90s as a pushy, bright young tech innovator, Musk had started out by
inventing and selling an online Yellow Pages-type site, got involved in Peter
Thiel’s PayPal and cleaned up again when this was sold to eBay. He got involved
in the electric automobile industry, giving us Teslas, while misleading the
public about their range.
His
SpaceX adventure and his preposterous and ignorant effusions about colonising
Mars were spectacular advertisements for his personal brand – so important for
inflating stock market valuation – especially when he did indeed invent rockets
that could be landed and re-used. But the question of how and when these
rockets will carry us to inhabitable planets remains unanswered. Both his cars
and his rocket ships got him on the receiving end of millions of dollars of
federal money and lines of credit.
And at
the beginning of the 21st century he was still the darling of the liberal world
and the Obama administration for an apparently compelling eco-vision for
non-fossil-fuel cars.
All this
changed when Joe Biden seemed to be casting a cold eye on Musk’s businesses,
and Musk went all in on promoting Trump 2.0 in 2024 and was rewarded with that
grotesque Doge sinecure, damaging American public finances – from which he had
benefited so lavishly.
What is
so absorbing about Gibney’s documentary is that it has the structure and
rhetoric of a film that could be about, say, Elizabeth Holmes, disgraced
inventor of the phoney blood-test, or Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency
fraudster, or Billy McFarland, promoter of the Fyre festival. All of these were
media darlings in their day, supposed visionaries and feted disrupters, talking
the talk in front of saucer-eyed believers.
Unlike
these illusionists Musk does have actual palpable success, with Tesla being a
long-standing profitable company and Space X, among other things inventing
successful re-usable rockets, allied with a skill they don’t have in moving on
from commodity to commodity, while controlling the means of production in
social media and cultivating the presidency. Just as well because, if Musk were
ever to fall, it would truly send shock waves through Wall Street, Washington
and Silicon Valley.
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