‘Musk’ Review: Alex Gibney’s Portrait of a Tech Titan

Elon Musk. You’ve heard of him? Some like him, others don’t.

Alex Gibney, in his four-hour documentary “Musk,” has some thoughts. Narration and titles include the following: “Musk didn’t just move to Texas. He colonized it.” “Could it be that the world’s richest man was also its most flamboyant fraud?” “THE MAD TECHNOKING.”

So, put Mr. Gibney on the “don’t” side. The documentarian’s dozens of films tend to divide into the curiosity-driven and the outrage-driven. The curiosity-driven ones (“Sinatra: All or Nothing at All,” “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” and last month’s “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie”) are almost uniformly excellent; the outrage-driven ones vary in quality. “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer” was an unpersuasive defense of one of New York’s several disgraced ex-governors.

Mr. Musk has provided his detractors with legitimate lines of attack, but when it comes to our most notable figures, even-tempered rationality becomes vital. Mr. Gibney provides a useful overview of an eventful life but frequently veers off-track into bristling hyperbole.

A long section on failures of the self-driving technology in Mr. Musk’s Tesla cars makes for gruesomely powerful cinema, as Mr. Gibney presents awful images from a lethal crash of a Tesla that plowed through end-of-road signs (while its driver wasn’t looking at the road). The company has settled several lawsuits resulting from collisions that occurred on autopilot. But the pertinent question here should be whether human-driven cars are safer than autonomous ones, and Mr. Gibney simply does not ask it.

The film takes the normal route of using archival footage plus new and revealing interviews with Musk observers (nearly all vociferous detractors; included are mothers of his children and former business partners). Mr. Gibney adds one unusual feature. Since he couldn’t land an interview with his subject (“hit piece,” Mr. Musk accurately predicted back in 2023 on X, the social-media site he owns), Mr. Gibney takes remarks from previous interviews and puts them in the mouth of a digital simulation of Mr. Musk. For a tech-centered film, the approach seems both novel and appropriate. This fake Musk comes off as arrogant and dismissive (and a bit odd-looking, with an oversize head), though he also makes valid points.

Mr. Musk has derided this film as “boring.” That it is not. Everything about the world’s richest person is fascinating, such as his rough South African childhood (he was punched in the face “many times”), described in part in a new interview with the entrepreneur’s father, Errol. “Do not bet against Elon. You are going to lose,” says the older man. Also compelling is a step-by-step account of how Elon Musk’s supposed “major government reform” agency DOGE failed dismally, even according to him. “The government,” Mr. Musk declared, “is basically unfixable.” Hiring young engineers with no knowledge of Washington wasn’t wise or effective.

Mr. Gibney frequently comes across as unfair or petty, such as when he denounces the Musk companies for taking government subsidies. Given that the automaker’s native California and the federal government have loudly and frequently called electric vehicles an indispensable tool to reduce carbon emissions, it’s hardly a mystery why such subsidies exist or why Mr. Musk availed himself of them. A segment on Mr. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter plays down the worrisome censorious excesses of its pre-Musk era and overplays worries about the current one. Are we supposed to care what staffing levels the company’s new owner deemed appropriate? Mr. Musk’s public embrace of Donald Trump is fairly easy to understand when Mr. Gibney reports that, in the Biden years, 11 federal departments were running 32 different investigations into Musk companies.

In another chapter, Mr. Gibney exhibits amazement about Mr. Musk’s many children (14 that we know of, though the director suggests there could be a lot more). The trillionaire’s reasoning is clear enough: He thinks humans are a vital resource and he is leading by example (not to mention spreading what he believes to be good DNA). “Having a kid is a vote for the future,” Musk says in the film. Mr. Gibney’s snarking about Musk’s possibly fanciful mission to Mars also seems off-base; with a market cap north of $2 trillion, SpaceX is highly valued, whether the filmmaker likes it or not. (As of this writing, Mr. Musk is the world’s only trillionaire.)

Mr. Gibney wraps up his wide-ranging feature with dire thoughts: Mr. Musk’s “satellites choke the skies,” his “army of robots” could “take over the planet,” etc. Viewers who have just spent four hours being told that Mr. Musk is a freak, fraud and failure will be puzzled at the suggestion that he is nevertheless all-powerful.