Alex Gibney has spent nearly four years chasing a man who treats the planet like a group chat he can mute. The result is *Musk*, a nearly four-hour documentary premiering out of competition at Venice on September 8 before Bleecker Street puts it in theaters October 16, and it arrives with a thesis sharp enough to cut glass: the richest man alive is also one of the most dangerously chaotic, and the rest of us are living inside the fallout.
That is not a subtle pitch. It is not supposed to be. Gibney, 72, the Oscar winner who already took the curtain down on Scientology, Enron, and the Catholic Church, started this thing in late 2022 thinking he was making a two-hour HBO portrait. Then Musk poured an estimated $290 million into delivering Donald Trump the presidency, landed the DOGE portfolio, and kept rewriting the third act in public. HBO told Gibney to keep rolling. A six-hour cut got trimmed. Festivals get three hours and forty-five minutes. HBO’s 2027 version runs four. Maximalist subject, maximalist runtime. Massive shock.
Musk never sat for an interview. He called the project a hit piece years ago, then recently upgraded Gibney to “douchebag to his core” who is “incredibly biased.” Classic move. Refuse the chair, then litigate the cut from the timeline. Gibney’s reply energy has always been dry: when Musk first dismissed it, Gibney shot back, “How would you know?” The film does not need Musk’s participation to function. It needs structure. On that front, Gibney is leaning hard into the Oz metaphor he floated in the editing suite.
The Curtain Is the Point, Not the Length
“The Great and Terrible Oz kept people in check because they were afraid of his visage that loomed over everybody, and he used that power to exert an enormous amount of control,” Gibney told The Hollywood Reporter. “But when a little dog pulled aside the curtain, and you can see a frumpy man operating gears and levers, suddenly he wasn’t so terrible and he wasn’t so great.” Stay with me here. That is the whole bet of the movie. Not that Musk is cartoon evil. That the machinery is visible if you sit still long enough, and once you see the levers, the mystique starts leaking.
Gibney is blunt about the psychology underneath. “Someone who worked closely with Elon told me, ‘He’s the most miserable man I’ve ever met.’ So he’s inflicting his misery on everyone else.” And the line that should travel: “People assume because he’s very rich that he’s not crazy. But the terrifying thing might be that he’s crazy and he’s very rich and powerful. That’s the warning bell the film sounds.” Sam Harris, in the film, lands the same diagnosis with clinical coldness: “We are living in a world where one person’s psychopathology and neuropsychological dysregulation is translating into massive consequence in our politics, in our economy, in our geopolitics. It’s completely insane we have one person who’s this chaotic.”
Look, I get it. Four hours of anyone is a ask. Theatrical docs already face an audience that treats nonfiction like homework. Gibney is counting on the fact that Musk is not a closed chapter. DOGE alone, per the reporting around the film, cost roughly 270,000 federal employees their jobs and gutted lifesaving aid streams. The film argues Full Self-Driving claims sit against more than sixty related deaths. Starlink is infrastructure with a political off-switch. Neuralink’s animal-testing record is ugly. Childhood material from Errol Musk is in the cut. None of that is “stunning and brave” for existing. It is only useful if the assembly has a spine instead of a scrapbook energy.
Power Does Not Sit for Portrait Sessions
Here is where Gibney’s craft either saves the movie or sinks it. He has said he was on the fence until a friend framed it as a film about twenty-first-century power. That is the right frame. The danger is turning the runtime into a greatest-hits of every Musk controversy since PayPal. Good docs about living power brokers do what *Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room* did and what the best stretches of *Going Clear* did: they show the operating system, not just the scandals. Gibney claims the through-line is simulation, Musk’s recurring idea that reality itself is a game he gets to define. “We’re playing with levels of reality,” he said, “and the elements of the Elon Musk story are how he intends to define reality.” David Byrne even wrote the end-credits song, “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” out of Musk’s own hard-core lexicon. That is either a perfect needle-drop or a cute stunt. We will know in the room.
The DOGE material is the live wire. Gibney’s own source language is careful and still alarming: Super Admin access to federal IT systems, the technical ability to copy data “as easily as dropping a file into a folder.” He is honest that the film cannot prove what was done with it. It can prove the access existed. That distinction matters. Documentaries that overclaim become the thing they are attacking. Gibney has usually been better than that. “As he accretes more power, he’s no longer interested in checking his worst impulses,” he told THR. That sentence does more work than a dozen dunk clips.
Now, you might be thinking this is just prestige media punching the villain of the week. Fair suspicion. Hollywood loves a rich target it will never greenlight a studio feature about. Gibney is not a studio committee. His filmography is a museum of institutions that preferred the curtain stay closed. The test for *Musk* is whether the chaos diagnosis is earned by pattern and consequence, or whether it is a mood. Pattern is filmable. Mood is Twitter with better music.
Venice Will Not Save a Floppy Third Act
Bleecker Street is rolling this out theatrically with an eye on awards math and Byrne’s song in the mix for original song chatter. HBO holds the long version for 2027. That staggered release is smart business and a quiet admission: the story is still moving. Musk keeps generating chapters. Any portrait locked in 2026 is already negotiating with a man who treats the calendar like a suggestion. Gibney knows it. “It’s not the end of the path, but it’s definitely a distillation of the journey.”
I walked into this coverage expecting another authorized-adjacent tech hagiography or a pure pile-on. What the editing-suite reporting suggests is neither. It is a long, deliberate attempt to make power legible while the subject is still accumulating it. If the finished cut keeps the Oz spine, trusts the Harris and insider testimony, and resists turning every ex-wife and every tweet into equal screen time, it will do something theatrical nonfiction almost never does anymore: make the audience sit with an uncomfortable scale of one man’s reach. If it just stacks receipts until the runtime becomes its own punchline, then Musk’s “hit piece” dismissal writes itself, and the little dog never quite reaches the curtain.
The warning bell is already ringing. Gibney’s job was to make sure we can still hear the gears behind it.
