Musk

“While I’m happy for Musk to critique the world’s richest asshole, one has to wonder if all this scrutiny isn’t just fanning the flames.”

Title: Musk (2026)
Director: Alex Gibney 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Alex Gibney 👨🏼🇺🇸 and Michael J. Palmer 👨🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

Technical: 3.5/5

In his documentary Musk, director Alex Gibney taps into our society’s current ire with tech moguls who have amassed incredible financial and political power with few checks and balances. Among them, Elon Musk looms large as the world’s first trillionaire and currently the richest. Meanwhile, the average American can barely afford groceries. Musk turns this economic absurdity into an opportunity to explore how the founder of SpaceX got where he is—and all the lives he’s ruined along the way.

While I’m on board with the topic and Gibney’s framing, the 4-hour movie doesn’t do anything groundbreaking. It moves from subject to subject in a fairly linear fashion that would’ve been better suited for a 4-part limited series. Each episode could neatly track what the film covers more tediously: Musk’s early start-up days, an investigation into Tesla’s outrageous marketing (and coverups) that have killed people using its self-driving mode, a nauseating segment on Musk’s obsession with breeding (I never want to hear Musk’s ex-girlfriend Ashley St. Clair say “Gatling gun of sperm” ever again), and the business disasters that were Musk’s Twitter and DOGE takeovers. At its weakest, gimmicks such as Gibney’s AI-generated interview with Musk or a recurring overlay of him firing people from a shooter’s perspective in a video game get stale fast.

Regardless of the format and quibbles, though, Gibney’s plot points are interesting enough. Personal details feel more revelatory than the business exploits, which have largely been covered already by journalists over the years—in particular, the descriptions of Musk’s father, Errol, and his domestic abuse as described by Errol’s first wife (and Elon’s mom), Maye. When Elon’s exes Justine Wilson and St. Clair share disturbing accounts of how Elon treated them, with Gibney drawing clear parallels between Errol’s and Elon’s abuses towards women, the documentary sheds some fresh insights.

Gender: 2.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

The film centers on a male figure, but there are several female interviewees. Ex-wife Wilson and ex-girlfriend St. Clair have plenty of screen time, and they share their damning accounts of Musk as an abusive creep and a cold, transactional father. Tech journalist Kara Swisher also adds her own disparaging commentary. On the flip side, a woman who worked at NASA speaks positively about what SpaceX has done for space exploration. But by virtue of the documentary’s subject matter, women are only in this film for the express purpose of talking about Musk and his work.

Race: 1.5/5

East and South Asian men occasionally show up in brief scenes, which is natural given that Musk’s companies, such as Tesla, X, and Zip2, are part of the tech industry (in which more than 1 in 5 employees are Asian, according to Zippia). Otherwise, racial identity—or even Musk’s South African upbringing—is never really broached, and Gibney’s interview subjects are almost all white.

Bonus for LGBTQ: +0.50

Musk’s trans daughter, Vivian Wilson, has a few scenes where she shares why she isn’t a fan of her father. (It probably doesn’t help that Musk misgenders her and, according to her mom, cut off Vivian’s health insurance after Vivian came out as trans.) Another interviewee, Swisher, is a lesbian.

Mediaversity Grade: C- 2.67/5

Musk compiles an overview of Musk’s shady machinations, both business and personal. Someone needs to be keeping track, and Gibney bravely rises to the challenge, taking on legal flak and the movie’s ad-blocking by TikTok and (of course) X. While I’m happy for Musk to critique the world’s richest asshole, though, the fact remains that this documentary falls into a very, very long list of movies that center on powerful white men. Between this and similarly timed releases like The Social Reckoning (concerning Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg) and Artificial (about OpenAI’s Sam Altman), one has to wonder if all this scrutiny isn’t just fanning the flames.

Like Musk? Try these other titles featuring toxic people in power.

Grade: CLiOctober 15, 2026