SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — It’s easy to find people with bad things to say about tech magnate Elon Musk, and plenty of those people show up in “Musk,” a new documentary about his rise to political and corporate power. What’s more surprising in the film are the unflattering statements by some of his own employees, including ones who still work for him.
Some of the harshest scenes in the film, which opens Friday in Los Angeles and New York, are ones in which Musk’s lieutenants were recorded on video or in audio as they wielded power on his behalf or discussed what they had already done for him.
Warning: This article includes spoilers for the documentary “Musk.”
There are clips of Ashok Elluswamy, a high-ranking Tesla engineer, acknowledging in a videotaped deposition that an infamous hype video he helped put together in 2016 about the company’s self-driving capabilities was not an accurate representation of Tesla’s technology at the time.
There are also audio snippets from Jared Birchall, who handles Musk’s personal matters. He is heard on a recording of a phone call with online influencer Ashley St. Clair, shortly after she had given birth to a child she and Musk conceived, in which he plays hardball on child support arrangements.
Both incidents were documented in the media: Reuters reported in 2023 on the transcript of Elluswamy’s deposition, and The Wall Street Journal reported last year on Birchall’s phone call with St. Clair.
But the video and the audio appear to be newly public, giving the documentary a mix of voices beyond the usual critics and creating moments of surprise even for a viewer who is familiar with the ins and outs of Musk’s complicated story.
Filmmaker Alex Gibney says in the documentary that he and his team spent more than three years researching Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, pulling together not only archival interviews and hard-to-find footage but also a database of quotes from Musk that are peppered throughout the film.
Musk, 55, did not participate in the documentary, and he has panned it, saying on X that it is a “hit piece” and that Gibney has “zero integrity.” Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, Elluswamy and Birchall did not respond to requests for comment.
The nearly four-hour film is a comprehensive tour through Musk’s life story, with deep dives into the growth of SpaceX and Tesla, his fathering of 14 known children and his on-again, off-again alliance with President Donald Trump, including his becoming the biggest donor to Trump’s 2024 campaign.
The film is a reminder of how often Musk has put himself at the center of public discourse and pop culture, and it moves swiftly through the highlights and lowlights: from his 2021 hosting gig on “Saturday Night Live” and his chaotic purchase of Twitter the next year to his Grok chatbot’s embracing the identity “MechaHitler” and his wielding of a chain saw early in Trump’s second term.
“I like to call it a ‘svelte’ four-hour film,” producer Jessie Deeter said at a screening Wednesday at the Mill Valley Film Festival in Marin County, California. (The film has a 10-minute intermission, but it is still roughly the length of the 1962 epic “Lawrence of Arabia.”)
At the screening, which was about 90% full, the biggest applause came during a moment of anti-Musk defiance, as a former career federal employee explained why they quit the Trump administration last year rather than cooperate with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The film lands at another potentially pivotal moment for Musk, amid speculation that Democrats may investigate him if they take control of Congress after the midterm elections. Polling shows that Musk remains deeply divisive, with a majority of Americans holding unfavorable views of him even as Trump honored him at the White House on Thursday.
The documentary demonstrates that Musk’s dabbling in politics is nothing new: Archival videos show that, years before he endorsed Trump in 2024, Musk was rubbing elbows with politicians such as former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and getting benefits in return, such as low-emission credits for Tesla.
Part of what drives the documentary forward is how it crosses genres: Parts of it feel like a political thriller or a legal whodunit, while others are like a video game simulation, a science fiction fantasy or a celebrity tabloid drama.
Other moments are closer to a horror film, especially as Gibney narrates some of the graphic details of collisions involving Tesla’s driver-assistance software. He includes, for example, dashcam video from a 2019 crash in which a Tesla on “Autopilot” ran a stop sign in Florida and killed a pedestrian — a crash for which a jury found Tesla 33% at fault and ordered it to pay $243 million in damages.
One of the people interviewed in the film, science fiction author and tech activist Cory Doctorow, adds to the grim feeling by wearing a guillotine pin on his lapel.
Later, the documentary lingers again on death, as Gibney tries to tally the human cost of Musk’s drive last year to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development. Between shots of malnourished children in Africa and elsewhere, Samantha Power, who was a USAID administrator during the Biden administration, says the cuts froze some food programs for the world’s poor and blames the cuts for 14 million potential deaths. (The number is based on a projection published last year estimating possible deaths over the following five years.)
In the film’s rendering, the horror of those statistics and images stands in stark contrast with Musk’s ongoing obsession: traveling deeper into space, including to Mars, for the potential benefit of future, unborn generations.
A few parts of the film are presented without evidence or explanation. Gibney boosts a conspiracy theory that Musk used his Starlink constellation of internet satellites to meddle in the 2024 election — an unfounded idea that independent fact-checkers have long criticized. He also raises concerns about potential data collection by Starlink satellites and by Tesla vehicles but does not go beyond vague theories.
A more pressing question the film wrestles with is whether or how much Musk has changed over his years in the public spotlight. The film repeatedly shows a younger Musk who is not only physically different, with thinner hair and a slighter build, but also speaking about different issues from those he addresses now — including “oil addiction,” an old motivation behind growing Tesla.
Another of Musk’s associates, former SpaceX engineer Jim Cantrell, says in the film that Musk has changed less than some people may imagine.
“Success has allowed him to take the lid off what he’s really thinking,” he says.
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