Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary on Elon Musk arrived at Venice last week with the weight of a cultural reckoning. The standing ovation felt like relief—the sense that someone powerful enough, skilled enough, had finally held up a mirror to the world’s richest man and forced us to look. By the time you walk out of the theater, exhausted and slightly nauseated, you might believe the film has done something momentous. But somewhere between the teaser’s damning sound bites and the actual documentary work, a different kind of problem emerges: not that Gibney failed, exactly, but that he succeeded too well at a narrower project than he seems to think he’s making.
Let’s start with the AI avatar, because it refuses to stop bothering me even as I try to move past it. Gibney uses a digital version of Musk—constructed from thousands of hours of interviews, voiced and animated through artificial intelligence—to fill the absence created by Musk’s refusal to sit down. It’s a clever dodge, and in some sense a stroke of audacity. But it’s also a betrayal of everything Gibney claims the film is investigating. The documentary spends considerable time, especially in its second half, examining Musk’s relationship with technology as a tool of power and control. The AI Musk is, quite literally, technology being used to simulate power and control. It’s not subtle irony. It’s not even irony that lands. It’s a choice that undermines the film’s moral architecture in real time, the way a building designer criticizing shoddy foundations while standing on compromised support beams does.
Some critics have called this creative genius. I can see the argument. Without Musk to interview, Gibney needed to represent him somehow, and an AI avatar at least acknowledges the artificiality rather than hiding behind the standard documentary trick of having the director read letters or use actors to voice reconstructed dialogue. But here’s what troubles me more: the AI avatar absolves Gibney of a harder problem. It allows him to have Musk “present” without any resistance, without any actual friction. Every word that comes out of the avatar’s mouth is derived from Musk’s own words, yes, but it’s curated, assembled, arranged by Gibney’s team for dramatic and argumentative effect. The avatar never contradicts the film’s thesis. It can’t. It’s built to confirm it. In that sense, Gibney has created the most compliant version of Elon Musk possible, and then used that compliance as proof of something like truth.
This matters because the entire machinery of the film—its length, its scope, its array of testimonies and archival material—exists to make a specific claim: that Musk represents an unprecedented concentration of unchecked power, that his influence on politics, technology, military affairs, and human reproduction has metastasized in ways we’re only beginning to reckon with. The documentary is often excellent at *documenting* these connections. What it rarely does is *prove* them in the evidentiary sense. Take the film’s treatment of Musk’s USAID cuts, which reviewers have highlighted as one of the most damning sequences. The film asserts sweeping impacts from these policy shifts, especially in post-2025 material that sears with immediacy. But the film doesn’t show the work. It doesn’t walk through the actual mechanism of causation, the economic modeling, the alternative scenarios. It asserts the connection with enough visual and emotional weight that the assertion acquires the texture of fact. That’s documentarymaking, sure. But it’s also propaganda, just propaganda in service of a conclusion many of us might already agree with.
And here’s where I find myself resisting the urge to dismiss the film entirely, because that resistance matters. Gibney has documented—actually documented, in the granular sense—patterns in Musk’s behavior that deserve scrutiny. The portrait of his personal relationships is particularly strong, especially the interview with Ashley St. Clair, Musk’s former partner and mother of his youngest child. St. Clair’s account has a credibility that the AI avatar will never possess. She’s there. She speaks with the particular grain of someone recounting lived experience rather than assembled narrative. The film’s treatment of Musk’s “pro-natalist” ideology, and how it manifests in his choices about his own children—including his rejection of his trans daughter Vivian—feels less like argument and more like evidence. These moments work because they’re specific, because they’re lived, because they have resistance in them.
But then the film pulls back to the macro level, and it wants to tell you something about the nature of power, about the way Musk functions as a kind of political force, about simulation and authenticity and the difference between innovation and marketing genius. And this is where the ambition starts to collapse under its own weight. Four hours is a long time to sustain an argument, but it’s also not long enough to actually resolve the questions Gibney keeps raising. Is Musk a villain? Is he a fool? Is he a necessary corrective to institutional sclerosis? Is he a symptom of late capitalism’s inability to check concentrated wealth? The film gestures at all of these simultaneously, and gesturing isn’t the same as grappling.
What’s interesting is how Musk’s non-participation actually functions as a kind of victory in the film’s terms. By refusing to show up, by dismissing Gibney as a hack, by weaponizing his social media presence against the very act of documentation, Musk demonstrates exactly what the film claims about him: he’s indifferent to accountability, contemptuous of scrutiny, convinced of his own rightness. The refusal becomes the most eloquent argument against him. Which means, in a strange inversion, that the AI avatar and the testimonies and the archival footage are almost redundant. The real “interview” with Musk is his refusal to be interviewed. Everything else is elaboration.
This brings us to a harder question: What is this film actually for? Gibney seems to believe it’s for understanding Musk—for pulling back the mythology and examining what lies beneath. But understanding Musk, as anyone who’s spent five minutes on the internet knows, is not the problem. We understand him quite well by now. We understand his impulses, his contradictions, his claims about saving humanity and his indifference to the actual humans in his orbit. The problem isn’t understanding. The problem is what to do with the understanding. And here Gibney’s film, for all its thoroughness, has nothing to offer. It’s a diagnosis with no cure, a portrait of the disease that doesn’t even try to sketch a treatment.
The length of the film becomes a kind of avoidance mechanism. Four hours suggests comprehensiveness, exhaustiveness, the kind of totality that might justify the act of judgment. But length is also a way of deferring judgment. By adding more context, more testimony, more visual material, Gibney can claim to be documenting rather than editorializing. Except, of course, every edit is an editorial choice. The questions he doesn’t ask are as revealing as the ones he does. The subjects who appear are less telling than the ones who don’t. And the overall shape of the narrative—beginning with Musk’s early ventures, building through his accumulation of power, and climaxing with his influence on American politics—is a familiar story arc that we’ve inherited from previous documentaries about Enron and Scientology and other exercises in institutional rot. Gibney is a master of this form. That mastery is partly what makes the film compelling, and partly what makes it insufficient.
There’s also something worth noting about who gets to make documentaries like this, and what kinds of power they’re allowed to wield. Gibney has enormous cultural authority. The film will be seen in theaters, on HBO, at festivals. It will influence perception. And I don’t say that as a complaint—that’s what documentaries do. But there’s an asymmetry worth reckoning with. Musk won’t be able to effectively respond. He’ll dismiss it, attack Gibney, retreat into his social media fortress. His supporters will claim it’s a hit piece (it is, though that’s not the same as being false). But Gibney will have had the last word in the public conversation about Gibney’s film about Musk. The documentary form, in this context, is a kind of power too. And Gibney wields it with skill and without much self-interrogation.
Still. There’s something to be said for a director who spent years assembling an exhaustive examination of the man, who resisted the urge to make a quick “takedown” and instead committed to the harder work of context and connection. If the film doesn’t fully land as a coherent argument about power and technology and politics, it’s at least honest about the ambition. Gibney isn’t pretending to solve anything. He’s showing you the shape of the problem and trusting you to feel the weight of it. Venice’s standing ovation suggests that many people left the theater feeling that weight. Some of that feeling is legitimate response to the material. Some of it is exhaustion mistaken for revelation. Some of it is the relief of seeing power called out, even imperfectly, on a screen large enough and public enough to matter.
The question, as you’re filing out of the theater four hours later, is whether you’ve understood something you didn’t before, or whether you’ve simply been sat with your understanding for longer than is comfortable. The answer probably depends on who you are and what you already believed about Musk when the credits started rolling. Which is to say: the film preaches. It doesn’t convert. And in a moment when we need conversion—when we need to actually *change* how power is distributed and checked in this world—preaching to the converted starts to feel like an evasion of the harder work. Gibney’s Musk is a serious film about a serious problem. But seriousness, like length, can be a way of avoiding the most difficult questions altogether.
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