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.
Alex Gibney, the 72-year-old Oscar-winning documentarian behind Musk
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“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.
.jpg "Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes Doc Met With Shock and Awe at Secret Screening")
