Elon Musk Unmasked in Alex Gibney Documentary: "Insane a Person This Chaotic Has So Much Power"

He is the richest man on earth. An explosive new film from the Oscar-winning director suggests he also may be among the most dangerous.

Alex Gibney's nearly four-hour documentary Musk made its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 8, receiving a five-minute standing ovation from a crowd that one attendee described as "exhausted" by the film's relentless intensity.

The film, which opens in U.S. theaters on October 16, is less a straightforward biography than a forensic investigation into how Musk accumulated extraordinary influence over global affairs — from Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink to X and his co-pilot seat inside Donald Trump's political movement.

The St. Clair Testimony

The documentary's most damning moments come from Ashley St. Clair, Musk's former girlfriend and mother of one of his children. She describes Musk having a "degree of certainty" about the 2024 election results before they came in that she "had never seen before."

She recounts a text exchange in which Musk told her he was going to unleash the "anomaly in the matrix." When Gibney asks if she thinks he was referring to Starlink, she replies: "I mean, I don't know where else he has space lasers."

Gibney leaves the meaning ambiguous — was it a troll or a confession? — but his voiceover signals he's taking it seriously: "What is Elon building, what are his goals, what are his actual motivations, and do we even know this man at all?"

The DOGE Data Allegation

The second major allegation concerns Musk's four-month stint leading the Department of Government Efficiency. Gibney suggests that DOGE members had Super Admin status to federal IT systems, meaning they could have copied intimate data on tens of millions of Americans — voting records, personal information, everything — and transferred it to SpaceX.

"We don't know what DOGE/Musk did with the data," Gibney writes in a follow-up email cited by The Hollywood Reporter. "What we do know is that the DOGE Boys had Super Admin status. That means they could just slide a copy of the data on all of us to SpaceX as easily as dropping a file into a folder."

The allegation squares with a whistleblower complaint filed by the Social Security Administration's chief data officer.

Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning AI pioneer, offers a chilling use case onscreen: "It's fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections. If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do."

"People Assume Because He's Very Rich That He's Not Crazy"

The film's thematic climax comes from Sam Harris, the podcaster and former Musk friend turned critic.

"We are living in a world where one person's psychopathology and neuropsychological dysregulation is translating into massive consequence in our politics, in our economy, in our geopolitics," Harris says. "It's completely insane we have one person who's this chaotic — who's completely unelected — and has this much power."

Gibney makes clear he doesn't consider such statements hyperbolic.

"People assume because he's very rich that he's not crazy," Gibney says. "But the terrifying thing might be that he's crazy and he's very rich and powerful. That's the warning bell the film sounds."

At the Venice press conference, Gibney called Musk "extremely, very dangerous" to democracy. "I think he's pursuing a global right-wing agenda, both for ideological and for very practical and monetary reasons," he said, pointing to Musk's support for right-wing movements in Germany, the U.K., Brazil, and Turkey.

The Musk Response

Musk did not participate in the documentary. When Gibney first announced the project three years ago, Musk took to X to call it a "hit piece" and later tweeted: "Gibney is a douche." Gibney's response: "Douché" — marking perhaps the first time in recorded history that a rap battle was settled with an accent aigu.

Musk's legal team sent a formal legal threat over the film, according to multiple reports. Gibney built the AI avatar of Musk specifically because his subject refused to appear.

The AI Musk

The digital doppelgänger — built from a database of every interview and public statement Musk has ever made — has an "overly expressive face and unsettling heavy breathing," writes The Verge's reviewer, but it's "a smart way of putting Musk's face to his words."

The avatar also appears in first-person-shooter sequences, where a vintage video game version of Musk moves through levels dismantling Twitter and the government with a chainsaw that shoots lasers.

It's absurd. But as the reviewer notes: "Then again we're here, in part, because of a kid bureaucrat named Big Balls."

Critical Reception

Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, though critics note the film's four-hour runtime may limit its reach to those who need convincing.

The Hollywood Reporter called it "a poleaxing portrait of the tech titan as a con man given way too much power to be stopped." Variety described it as "lacerating" and "an important watch." IndieWire labeled it "a distressing, damning, alarming summary" of Musk's rise.

The Verge struck a more ambivalent note: "Musk tells it compellingly and convincingly, but doesn't offer much in the way of revelations if you're aware of Musk's catastrophic influence on the world. For everyone else, a demanding runtime just shy of four hours might prove too much of a barrier."

The Question the Film Asks

Gibney set out to answer two questions: how Musk got so powerful, and why we allowed it to happen. The answer, the film argues, is that by the time most people realized what was happening, Musk was already too rich and too deeply embedded in critical infrastructure — Starlink, SpaceX, NASA contracts, social media — to be stopped.

"As he accretes more power, he's no longer interested in checking his worst impulses," Gibney said. He recalled what a former close Musk associate told him: "He's the most miserable man I've ever met. So he's inflicting his misery on everyone else."

Musk opens in theaters October 16.