New Delhi: The teaser for Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk documentary Musk was released on 7 September. The film examines Musk’s rise and his influence over business, technology, media and politics. It is set to premiere at the Venice Film Festival on 8 September.
The 48-second teaser follows the flight of a SpaceX rocket. As it rises, voices describe Musk in extravagant terms. He is called “possibly the greatest living inventor,” “the real-life Iron Man,” “one of the greatest builders of all time,” and “the greatest capitalist in history.”
The tone changes when the rocket begins to spin out of control. Musk is now described as “chaotic, random, capricious” and “manifestly cruel and selfish.” “In a science fiction novel, he would not be the hero,” one voice says.
As the rocket falls back toward Earth, another voice calls Musk “a man who has lost his mind.” The screen goes dark and the words “Earth’s most unchecked man” appear. A voice then calls him a fascist. The last line heard in the teaser is: “Elon is a nuke.”
Musk declined to be interviewed for the documentary. However, Gibney told AP News that he had begun working on it as “a kind of admirer” and hoped Musk would take part.
“Ultimately he didn’t want to talk to me. Then you start digging into the facts, and you follow them where they lead. And where they led for me was to a place that upended the myth, I would say, of Elon Musk as a kind of modern Leonardo da Vinci,” Gibeny said.
The film includes interviews with Musk’s ex-wife Justine Musk and his former partner Ashley St Clair. Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, journalists Kara Swisher and Zoë Schiffer, as well as computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, also feature in the documentary.
Musk also features an original song by David Byrne. The song, ‘Let Me Sell You a Dream’, was co-written with composer Daniel Pemberton. Its lyrics are drawn from Musk’s public statements.
But the tech mogul has dismissed the film. He called it a “hit piece” when the project was announced in 2023 and used the phrase again in August. He also questioned its length, asking whether Gibney was trying to “bore people to death.”
Gibney has previously directed documentaries including Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015) and The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019).
Musk has a runtime of 225 minutes and will be shown with a 10-minute intermission. It will open in cinemas in the United States on 16 October. An India release date has not yet been announced.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)