Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney is set to release his epic documentary on one of the most deluded and dangerous men alive, South Afrikaner white supremacist and anti-semite Elon "Leon" Musk. It's taken years to film and assemble, and will preview at the Venice Film Festival next Tuesday, September 8. Below is an excerpt from The Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik's comprehensive article about the film. Keep in mind as you read it that Musk is spending at least $100 million to boost Republican candidates this fall, and ask yourself why the broken media isn't questioning them about receiving his money:
"Gibney has crafted a movie that, while not new in its specifics, is often damning in its totality, standing apart from anything the media entertainment complex has recently turned out — a portrait of power with the cinematic scope of All the King’s Men and the potential social impact of The Pentagon Papers. (“It’s rare these days to see a complete story instead of the fragments we’re used to,” says Anonymous Content’s Nick Shumaker, a producer on the film.) Some will surely find Musk overly negative and conspiratorial. Yet nearly every time the film seems like it might tip into paranoid fantasy, Gibney unearths a new fact or asks a new commonsense question to steady us back.
Gibney spends the first half of the film coming at Musk for various alleged sins, including stealing credit from original Tesla founder Martin Eberhard; bullying a woman who birthed his child to sign an NDA; pumping his stocks with shaky talk of Mars exploration and full self-driving cars (the latter of which Gibney also alleges are responsible for more than 60 deaths); and turning a light on the monkeys experimented on at Neuralink who advocacy groups say suffered needlessly. Not nearly as adept at all the substantive tasks of running a company as he claims, Elon Musk, Gibney argues, excels mainly at selling tall tales.
Even these multiple levels of alleged villainy, however, seem narrow compared to what the director argues in the second half is the real game: world domination. In Gibney’s telling, to witness Musk convert his satellite internet system Starlink into an unelected policymaker given its crucial role in Ukraine and other war-torn places; to see NASA rely so heavily on SpaceX to perpetuate its space program; to watch Musk seemingly use Twitter to garner business favors from world leaders like Modi and Milei; to look with growing dread as the data collected by DOGE potentially becomes a sleeper cell for campaign research and political retaliation — to observe all of this is to gaze upon a man interested not only in wealth and status but in an oligarchal sway that transcends elections’ fickle seasons. Donald Trump may have spent six years bringing the branches of government to heel. But in Gibney’s accounting Musk is in the process of pulling off something far more menacing: rendering government obsolete altogether." (our emphasis)
Musk's DOGE catastrophe terminated USAID programs to provide food and medicine primarily to African women and children, resulting in what The Lancet estimates are hundreds of thousands of deaths and rising. That's not to mention the turmoil he created within the Federal Government as he slashed jobs without much more than the advice of 20 somethings who were used to software coding and little more. It's horrifying what damage this monster has done and is further capable of.
It's important to read Zeitchik's entire, fascinating article, and then see the film when it arrives on screens and streaming. Then you'll know fully what our democracy is up against.
(photo: the infamous photo of Musk giving the "sieg heil" salute)
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