Four hours on one man

Alex Gibney's documentary Musk premiered at Venice, heads to Toronto, and opens in U.S. theaters on Oct. 16. Even at four hours it can't cover everything.

Who it's actually for

Too long for the casually curious, too thin to be complete. It works best for people who know Musk is bad but not how bad, or how he got that powerful.

Split down the middle

Gibney divides the story into pre- and post-COVID, the moment Musk's bond with the MAGA right became something far past wanting lower taxes.

Hair balls at Zip2

At 23 he co-founded Zip2, basically an online Yellow Pages, and walked off with over $20 million. His fellow programmers called his tangled code "hair balls."

“hair balls”

Fired on his honeymoon

His run as PayPal CEO lasted months. The board removed him mid-honeymoon, but he left with enough cash to start SpaceX.

A one-man nation-state

By 2010 SpaceX had launched and recovered an uncrewed capsule. News reports listed the only entities to manage it: the U.S., Russia, China, and Elon Musk.

“the U.S., Russia, China, and Elon Musk”

The god-king problem

Credulous media and easy investors helped, but the deeper rot is a culture that treats founders as visionaries whose companies are extensions of their genius.

He bought the word founder

Musk invested in Tesla six months after incorporation, accused CEO Martin Eberhard of fraud, then settled Eberhard's libel suit on the condition he could call himself a founder.

Science fiction as fact

Tesla's Autopilot director testified the company knowingly released a promo video showing self-driving as already achieved. The tech has been implicated in dozens of fatal crashes.

“Could it be that the world's richest man was also its most flamboyant fraud?”

author_is_elon

Furious that Biden's Super Bowl tweet beat his on likes, Musk had 80 engineers work overnight on Twitter's algorithm, adding a tag to boost his own posts above everyone's.

“author_is_elon”

Radicalized by lockdown

A man who never accepted excuses from subordinates was told to sacrifice for the public good. Twitter handed him endless pseudo-information to justify his gut.

“woke mind virus”

The trail his fans laid

His most unrestrained posts, often the most racist or sexist, drew the biggest response, so he followed them. About three quarters of his posts are replies.

A million-dollar bet lost

Sam Harris urged Musk to walk back calling COVID panic "dumb." Musk bet him a million dollars U.S. cases would never hit 35,000. The friendship did not survive.

“And that, honestly, appears to have been the end of our friendship.”

His ex-wife saw it first

Justine Musk says the man the world met in 2020 is the one she married in 2000. At their first dance he reminded her he was "the alpha." She learned the word gaslighting from him.

“the alpha”

Blocked and cut off

Ashley St. Clair watched Musk block Grimes when she begged to see their son. After St. Clair criticized his treatment of his trans daughter, he cut her child support by 60 percent.

Someone else will be next

Gibney frames Musk as an extinction-level threat and misses the bigger point. He's a symptom. Keep growing inequality and worshipping strongmen, and the next one may be worse.