YNOT at the Movies

The richest man in the world has built a reputation on selling visions of the future. But what if the real product has always been the man selling them? When Elon Musk declined to be interviewed for Alex Gibney's documentary about him, the filmmaker found another way to put him in the hot seat: let Musk's own words do the talking. The result is an extensive, sharply critical portrait of a tech titan whose public image may be his most successful invention. Yet even after nearly four hours, the man behind that image remains difficult to understand.

Director Alex Gibney's "Musk" (USA 2026 | 235 min. | Documentary) traces Musk's rise from his Silicon Valley start-up days to his growing influence in the Trump administration. Spanning Tesla, SpaceX, social media, artificial intelligence, and politics, the film attempts to make sense of a man whose ambitions reach far beyond the companies he runs. Its scope is formidable, but not every chapter sustains the same level of interest.

With Musk refusing to sit for an interview, Gibney uses a digital avatar to stand in for the absent subject. The avatar speaks through Musk's own recorded words, an inventive solution that gives the filmmaker a way to confront him without his cooperation. But there is a catch: hearing Musk repeat his own statements, even through a synthetic face, does not necessarily bring us any closer to knowing what drives him. His words are evidence, not an explanation.

The film moves through the defining episodes of Musk's career: Tesla and SpaceX, his purchase of Twitter and its transformation into X, and his role in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under President Trump. Gibney presents DOGE as a costly government experiment whose damage could be felt for decades, even as Musk argues that the government is beyond repair. The juxtaposition captures the gap between Musk's promises and the consequences of putting them into practice. Still, some chapters are more compelling than others, and the film's nearly four-hour runtime leaves little room for the weaker material to escape notice.

Musk's first wife, Justine Musk, and his father, Errol Musk, offer personal perspectives on the man behind the public persona. The film also interviews Ashley St. Clair, who shares a child with Musk. Their testimony adds perspectives that Musk's own words cannot provide, though no single account fully resolves the contradictions that define his public image.

Gibney makes no pretense of neutrality. The portrait is relentlessly critical, which helps explain why Musk has called the film a hit job. But a critical perspective is not automatically a weakness: Gibney has spent much of his career examining powerful people and the institutions that protect them, notably in "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" (2005) and "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley" (2019). Here, his point of view is unmistakable, and the accumulated evidence gives it force.

The problem is that Musk sometimes plays like an extended newsreel of the billionaire's controversies. Watching the events pile up makes their scale and consequences clear, but a catalogue of what happened is not the same as an account of why it happened. The film connects the dots across Musk's business ventures and political influence, yet the person at the center remains elusive. An avatar that repeats his words can expose contradictions, but it cannot reveal thoughts Musk has never shared.

Even so, the portrait is alarming. As Ashley St. Clair puts it, "Elon is a nuke." It is a startling description, but after watching the film's account of Musk's expanding influence, it is difficult to dismiss the concern behind it. The documentary makes a persuasive case that one person's ambitions can have consequences far beyond his own businesses, particularly when wealth, technology, and political power converge.

Ultimately, Musk is solid, if overlong, documentary journalism, closer in approach to PBS's "Frontline" than to a psychological portrait. It is thorough, pointed, and built on the public record. Its greatest strength is the breadth of evidence it assembles; its limitation is that evidence alone cannot fully explain the person who generated it. Gibney may not get inside Musk's head, but he gives viewers plenty of reason to question the power Musk has accumulated.

"Musk" opens in theaters on October 16, 2026.