Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary Musk opened in U.S. theaters on Friday, after Elon Musk’s lawyer threatened a defamation suit and after weeks of doubt over whether the film would be shown abroad.
The film doesn’t treat Musk as a visionary engineer. It presents him as a “Gilded Age confidence man” brought up to date, an investor posing as an inventor whose real talent is lifting stock prices and selling investors and the public on a high-tech future, Jennifer Ouellette wrote in a review for Ars Technica on Sunday. She called it compelling but overlong. It plays like two different films, she wrote, and offers little that readers who follow Musk closely haven’t already heard.
Musk had attacked the film well before Friday. On X he called Gibney a “crackpot” and the documentary a “hit piece,” TIME reported, and a lawyer for Musk threatened to sue for defamation. “He threatened to sue over a movie that he hadn’t even seen,” Gibney told the magazine.
The threat reached Universal Pictures, which holds the international rights. Ouellette described rumors that the studio was getting cold feet as “as yet unfounded.” Gibney gave a different account. In an interview with The New York Times, as TheWrap reported, he said Musk’s “formal legal notice” in September had unsettled Universal. Asked whether the studio saw a film about the world’s richest man as a problem in the current political climate, he said, “Maybe, but you have to ask them.”
Universal said publicly that its plans had not changed. On Oct. 5, a representative for Gibney told TIME that international distribution had been “worked out” after a call with the studio on Oct. 2. No further details were given.
Advertising was another fight. YouTube, Meta, TikTok and X all turned down the trailer in late September, citing its “political content,” and no platform would take the money of Bleecker Street, the film’s U.S. distributor. YouTube and Meta later reversed course. TikTok still hadn’t when TIME published its interview. X said it would allow the ads, Gibney said, “but we haven’t seen any evidence of it.”
The documentary goes through the familiar episodes. They include Tesla and the deaths linked to its driver-assistance systems, SpaceX and Starlink, the purchase of Twitter, Musk’s move from warning about AI to building the Grok chatbot, his support for President Trump, the creation of DOGE, his alleged drug use and his 14 children, possibly more.
Among those interviewed are his ex-wife Justine Musk, the journalist Kara Swisher, the Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, the AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, the writers Cory Doctorow and Adam Becker, and Sam Harris. Ashley St. Clair, a former MAGA influencer who had a child with Musk, also appears. David Byrne co-wrote and performed an original song for the soundtrack, “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” which works in more of Musk’s own words.
Gibney has made documentaries since the 1980s, on subjects from Scientology and WikiLeaks to Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes and Lance Armstrong. He was first nominated for an Oscar for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, from 2005, and he won best documentary feature for Taxi to the Dark Side.
“It’s certainly critical, but I think the criticism is earned,” he told TIME.