Sitting for an interview this September ahead of the film’s showing at the Toronto International Film Festival, Gibney was not too surprised by the dour perception: he had spent the previous few days fielding defamation lawsuit threats from a similarly unhappy Musk, after all<\/a>. That is along with Musk’s descriptions of Gibney as “a shill for the far left,” “horrible human” and, simply, a “douche.”<\/p>\n Gibney also acknowledged the foreboding length: it was only after they finished their original two-hour feature that Musk allied himself with U.S. President Donald Trump. At that point, he said, HBO executives told Gibney they needed to expand the work, using it as a\u00a0“building block for a much more epic drama \u2026 For this figure, who has so much influence on the future of the planet, it’s deserving of that three hours and 45 minutes.”<\/p>\n WATCH | Musk documentary trailer:<\/p>\n That relationship proved fraught on its own. The film hits North American theatres Oct. 16, but \u2014 at the time of the interview \u2014 Gibney was nervous. The international rights-holder, Universal, hadn’t confirmed whether it would even distribute the film outside North America, given the potential of political pressure. <\/p>\n At the same time, he said Paramount’s acquisition of HBO parent company Warner \u2014 with Paramount controlled by the Trump-friendly David Ellison \u2014 had him “concerned in the back of [his] mind” that the documentary’s streaming release could be scuppered entirely.\u00a0<\/p>\n Since that interview, Gibney has said<\/a> international theatrical release plans are now being discussed; the documentary is slated for an early 2027 streaming release, though no specific date has been given. When, or if, audiences do see it, he hopes the reception isn’t quite so bleak.\u00a0<\/p>\n “It’s not a funeral; it’s a warning. But things are pretty dark. We’re going to be lowered into the earth if we’re not careful,” the director said, even while recognizing the sheer inescapability of dread his film tends to elicit. “You know, and the film ends with the planet Earth exploding and Musk escaping on his spaceship. So that’s about as pessimistic as it gets.”<\/p>\n A question of objectivity<\/p>\n Though he started the project as an avowed Musk fan \u2014 a Tesla solar panel system-owner and all \u2014 by the time he began working on it in earnest, he says, any benefit of the doubt he had extended to his subject had evaporated. When he reached out to interview Musk himself, he said he was stonewalled.<\/p>\n Director Alex Gibney poses for portrait photographs for the film Musk during the 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, in September 2026. (Scott A Garfitt\/Invision\/The Associated Press)<\/p>\n Outreach to those around Musk was similarly stymied: close business associates uniformly refused to speak without his permission. The workaround was to instead give Musk a voice of his own. <\/p>\n An AI-avatar, using Musk’s own statements, narrates much of the documentary. Much of what it says, like the real Musk’s statements about the “hit piece” Gibney came out with<\/a>, is overtly critical of the documentary’s framing.<\/p>\n The result is a somewhat bifurcated, but overwhelmingly negative picture of a man Gibney asserts is at the centre of modern politics’ downfall. <\/p>\n There is the charting of Musk’s early history as a self-described “founder” at Paypal and Tesla \u2014 including interviews ranging from journalists covering him at the time to his former wife, Justine Musk \u2014 that characterize his public persona as an engineer and genius as little more than a PR-crafted lie. \u00a0<\/p>\n “There is a kind of generalised notion in modern societies that if you’re rich, you must be very smart \u2014 you must be a genius,” Gibney says, sharing the central thesis of the documentary. “But maybe you’re just ruthless. And maybe you can be very rich and very powerful \u2014 and also, to some extent, unhinged.”<\/p>\n And then there is Musk’s time at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and, in Gibney’s telling, his role as an architect of the dismantling of the U.S. federal government.\u00a0<\/p>\n The film includes accusations from former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair, the mother to one of Musk’s children, who speaks about cryptic text messages Musk sent her ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election that saw Trump re-elected \u2014 messages that include references to an “anomaly in the Matrix” created by “ten thousand lasers in space.”<\/a><\/p>\n Gibney then asks her whether she thinks that was a reference to SpaceX satellites. She responds: “I don’t know where else he has lasers.”<\/p>\n “I should point out that the remarks about the ‘anomaly in the Matrix’ and lasers from space didn’t come from a critic of Musk. It didn’t come from me; they came from Elon Musk himself,” Gibney said.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1792157534_189_default.jpg\")
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