There’s a striking moment near the end of Musk, a new documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, when the world’s richest man is asked why he considers it important to develop X into what he calls a global platform for collective consciousness.
“I guess …” Elon Musk replies to his questioner, the billionaire Indian entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath, before his voice trails off. There’s a pause of several seconds in which neither man says anything. Eventually, after a couple of false starts, Musk settles on: “To increase our understanding of the universe.”
The exchange — originally broadcast as part of Kamath’s People by WTF podcast in November 2025 — stands out because it follows more than three and a half hours of a film in which Musk is rarely short of words or solutions. We see his early successes during the dot-com boom, followed by his stewardship of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, the acquisition of Twitter and, ultimately, his alliance with President Donald Trump.
At every step, Gibney depicts Musk as relentlessly accumulating money and power, shrugging off a string of controversies — business and personal — along the way. The section on the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration initiative ostensibly created to identify and cut waste, is especially troubling to watch, particularly when it focuses on cuts to the US Agency for International Development and their impact on projects in Africa. But when asked to articulate his deeper purpose, the tycoon is lost for words.
Musk represents a prominent example of a shift in contemporary cinema: While multibillionaire tech tycoons have made for convenient villains in the past, recent portrayals are more frequent and less ambivalent. Gibney, 72 — a prolific filmmaker who won the 2007 Academy Award for best documentary feature for Taxi to the Dark Side, about abuse by American soldiers — paints a picture of ruthlessness, cynicism and a chronic lack of regulatory oversight. Musk is designed to leave the viewer feeling bleak about the world. As Gibney asks by way of a mission statement: “How could Musk assume so much power, and why had we given it to him?”
That question, to which there is no straightforward answer, speaks to a growing sense of public discomfort with the way superrich tech leaders and their companies have come to dominate the corporate, political and media landscape — as well as our personal lives. The release of Musk came just months after its subject became the world’s first trillionaire following SpaceX’s record-breaking initial public offering, an unheard-of level of wealth that is helping to fund Republican campaigns ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections. According to a Pew survey conducted last year, more than half of Americans have an unfavorable view of Musk, while two-thirds had a negative perception of Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.
Another version of Elon Musk appears in Artificial, which screened at this month’s London Film Festival ahead of its release this winter. The film, directed by Luca Guadagnino, charts the early years of OpenAI, which Musk co-founded in 2015. Musk left the company in 2018 and has tried unsuccessfully to sue its present incarnation, allowing writer Simon Rich to make the film version played by Ike Barinholtz a form of comic relief — all facial tics and self-importance — rather than anything more sinister.
The role of tech tycoon villain instead goes to Andrew Garfield, who plays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The film portrays him as the ultra-ambitious and unscrupulous driving force behind the company that gave us ChatGPT, with the movie’s conscience represented by co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever (played by Yura Borisov — best known as the kind-hearted henchman in Anora).
There’s an early scene around a private dining table where Sutskever excitedly shares his vision for artificial intelligence as something that can end pain, suffering and loneliness. “We’ll be free!” he tells his boisterous, all-male audience. The camera pans from face to face — Musk, Altman and others — and they look more like slavering vultures than people focused on humanity’s best interests.
Artificial goes on to tell the story of Altman and Sutskever’s eventual falling-out, with Altman fired and swiftly reinstated with the support of Microsoft Corp., OpenAI’s main investor. Garfield plays Altman as increasingly cold and manipulative, swatting aside any concerns about AI safety and the people who get in his way. “I didn’t invent teen suicide!” he yells at one fellow executive, when warned of ChatGPT’s darker potential.
Altman and his sycophantic entourage wildly celebrate various OpenAI milestones and chant “feel the AGI,” meaning artificial general intelligence — at one point around a bonfire — delighting in a creation that many warn could destroy the human race. Sutskever, cast as the good guy who cannot lie, is pushed out. (Altman told Vanity Fair this month that he didn’t expect the film to be an “accurate depiction,” given Guadagnino was just “trying to make a good movie.”)
A fictional tech billionaire features in another film screened at the London Film Festival: Bunker, directed by Florian Zeller, which is slated for release in early 2027. The movie stars real-life couple Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz as upwardly mobile Spaniards living in London, where their 17-year marriage has entered a rocky phase.
Bardem’s character, Miguel, is an architect tempted by an unusual and lucrative commission: An unnamed tycoon wants him to build a luxury bunker in Hawaii in preparation for a predicted societal breakdown. People in his position tend to map out scenarios, his potential client (Paul Dano) tells him, and dystopia is now a distinct possibility.
“This is everything that’s wrong with the world!” Miguel’s wife, Sofia (Cruz), retorts at home, protesting that those with the resources to hide from the collapse of civilization are the very people most likely to cause it. When the couple fret over their teenage daughter’s phone use, Sofia wryly reminds Miguel that his new client designed the app she is addicted to.
While Bunker is more about marriage than billionaires, Zeller is able to tap into what he knows will be the audience’s negative perception of Dano’s character to drive a wedge between his two protagonists. Meanwhile, Facebook founder Zuckerberg is building a real-life $100 million compound in Hawaii that includes an underground shelter, although he has denied it is intended as a doomsday bunker.
Zuckerberg and the origins of Facebook were the subject of David Fincher’s acclaimed 2010 movie, The Social Network, and it feels apt that writer Aaron Sorkin should return with a de facto sequel some 16 years later.
In the original movie, the action revolves around a litigation against Zuckerberg during Facebook’s early years. In this fall’s The Social Reckoning, he’s now well-established — and it’s Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) and Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) who are out to get him.
The story shows how the duo worked together on Horwitz’s award-winning reporting on Facebook and its algorithm in 2021, with a particular focus on how users can become radicalized and pushed toward extremist groups. In this film, Zuckerberg is played by Jeremy Strong rather than Jesse Eisenberg. But unlike in The Social Network, Zuckerberg is not a character we can explore and analyze — much less sympathize with. He’s a straightforward villain: rude to employees, concerned only with company growth and seemingly uninterested in user safety.
“They only point out problems,” Zuckerberg grumbles about Facebook’s civic integrity team, where Haugen works, shortly before it’s disbanded. “We’re a corkboard, we don’t control what’s pinned to it!” he later shouts. The implication: These bosses create — and become extraordinarily wealthy from — this technology, but they don’t want to be held responsible for how it’s used.
The rather unsubtle point of The Social Reckoning is that Facebook and Zuckerberg are terrible, while journalists and whistleblowers are good. It wasn’t as binary when Sorkin was writing The Social Network, where the Facebook founder could be seen as a misfit simply trying to get his own back on the alpha males and women he believed looked down on him.
Some may see Facebook as a product of the past, with the stakes around the technology developed by OpenAI and rival Anthropic PBC now much higher. The drunk woman who delivers a racist diatribe at police officers at the start of The Social Reckoning — radicalized by Facebook, Haugen deduces — may seem trivial compared with the potential for AI to overpower humanity, as is threatened in Artificial.
The power of technology to turn people against each other, only for us all to be overpowered by robots, drives the fear coursing through all these films. “We’ll have to build a bunker,” Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance), Sutskever’s early mentor, warns him early in Artificial. “And hide from the Terminator.”
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