If Elon Musk is a genius at anything, it’s making people think that he’s a genius. This becomes obvious early on in Musk, director Alex Gibney’s 235-minute documentary about the conditions that allowed for the creation of the world’s richest man. Gibney portrays Musk as a sort of grifter savant, someone who’s spent his entire life slipping out the back door of various lies, schemes, and outright frauds. His only real skill is charming investors, reporters, and the general public into believing that he has anything but his own interests in mind; trying to explain what it’s like working with him, one interview subject parses the difference between “lies” and “bullshit.”
That being said, this isn’t the “hit piece” Musk immediately dismissed it as on, ugh, fine, X. After the Nazi salute that wasn’t (or was it?) at Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, a common theme in the media flurry that followed was, essentially, “what’s this guy’s deal?” Musk is asking a similar question, following the South African entrepreneur as he glides his way from the dot-com ‘90s to 2010s Obama-era techno-optimism to Trump 2.0, enriching himself at every turn. And although it can only hint at the answers — megalomania, basically, and maybe drugs — it explores the culture around Musk in enough detail to explain how we got here.
