Musk Movie Review

“Musk” is a major-sized documentary for a major-sized figure. This is a close-up look at one of the most divisive people on the planet. Some claim him to be a devilish dictator. Others feel that he is responsible for many improvements in our global lives. Regardless if you love him or hate him, there is no way to ignore Elon Musk.

The documentary about Elon Musk goes pretty deep into his various successes, and failures. It must be in depth, because the full film runs close to four hours. Filmmaker Alex Gibney is well-known for many of his previous documentaries. However, his outreach to Elon Musk was rejected outright. Musk sent Gibney back some messages with disparaging descriptions of Gibney’s lineage. No problem for Gibney, though…

By the power of AI and computer graphics, Alex Gibney made a computer CGI avatar of ‘Elon Musk’. This is a weird ‘uncanny valley’ version of Musk’s image and likeness. Gibney can have an ‘interview’ in a few sections with this avatar stand-in for Musk. This is an unsettling image of a ‘Musk-like’ generated image sitting there talking to the camera.

Gibney goes into detail about Elon Musk’s journey from an immigrant to America, coming from South Africa. There are interview sections with Musk’s father, Errol Musk. Details are explained about how Elon Musk got an entrepreneurial start with a small online business called ‘Zip2’. This was sold and Musk walked away with millions.  He invested into PayPal, and again walked away with millions.

Musk had a knack for promotion of any business that he though would become huge. He came across Tesla, which already was created by other inventors and businessman. But with his savvy, and some would say, devious methods – he eventually remade the company in his own image. The original founders had been ‘uninvited’ to the party, and the business took off like a rocket.

Speaking of rockets, Elon Musk got wind of a new venture to build rockets that would take over from where NASA left off. He helped to put the company SpaceX on the radar of many government contracts. If only his engineers could create a rocket that did not blow up. On the fourth attempt, it was a successful launch into space. The future for SpaceX was very bright indeed. Elon Musk did not even have to walk away, he still made millions.

Still, there was more to Elon Musk than just business endeavors. He was married to Justine (Wilson) and they had children. But eventually Justine saw a smiling, beaming exterior held a much colder and bitter interior inside of Musk. Musk had a fascination with ‘repopulating’ the Earth with smaller little ‘Elon Musk’ babies. He married a second time (Talulah Riley), but that also did not last.

Elon Musk was able to attract many other women, including Ashley St. Clair. He produced babies with all of them. It was like it was a personal goal for him to make the Earth a fruitful place full of miniature versions of himself.  Since the man was worth billions, it was not difficult to create paper trail documents to care for his baby mommas, and his children. If they could not get his time, at least they got his money.

Many of Musk’s biggest successes were in promotions and promises. Many times he promoted things that were not true (or at least not as true as he thought they should be). Case in point: for Tesla one major selling point for the vehicle was ‘AutoPilot’. The ability for the car to ‘self-drive’ was the feature that everyone wanted. Based on an elaborate on-board camera system and some high-powered AI, this was reason to buy the Tesla.

The problem was Elon Musk oversold the public on the capabilities of the ‘AutoPilot’ system. There were a few (but highly publicized) crashes and some fatalities. Tesla would always settle out-of-court, to prevent any actual facts from becoming public of the systems failures. On occasion, a fact or two would dribble out, and made the car company look bad.

Much of the success regarding SpaceX was the way it had developed ‘reusable’ rockets. It was also a big help to get supplies to the International Space Station. Musk had even more ideas to use SpaceX to launch his own brand of satellites called Starlink. These swarmed into the low orbit surrounding the Earth. This has provided a lot of communication to just about any location on Earth.

Elon Musk was not satisfied with merely owning the skies and the communications in space. His next big thing was a plan to go and populate Mars. With new designs of a heavy-lift rocket (Starship), Musk was dead set on conquering worlds beyond our own meager planet. Why settle to be King of the World, when you could be King of Space?

Elon Musk was a heavy user of social media platform Twitter. When he saw that the owners and operators of the site leaned over to the Left, he came up with a challenge. Let me buy it, and turn it into ‘free speech zone’ on the Internet. The gauntlet was picked up and difficult job to amass the cash to take over Twitter was on.

The newly ‘relaunched’ company was downsized (drastically). The company was eventually renamed “X”. The transition from what had been ‘Twitter’ to what was now “X” turned out to be quite a rocky road. The people employed to keep it running had been slashed so much that it was almost broken all the time. But eventually most of kinks had been worked out.

There was one world that Elon Musk had yet to conquer. That was the world of politics. He entered, but not as a candidate. Instead, he became a mega-donor. In fact, he was a Mega-MAGA-Donor. He had unwavering support for Donald Trump.

When Trump became President, he made Elon Musk the head of something new called DOGE. This ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ was not only self-contradicting name for a small group of cost-cutters, it approached the federal workforce the same way his team approached Twitter.

Armed with a ‘Golden Chainsaw’, Musk ripped through the federal government like it was one of his corporate possessions. Quick on his feet, the man with a plan always rode in to his life, his businesses and his relationships like whirling dervish.

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“Musk” has many things about it to appreciate as a deep-dive documentary. There are plenty of ‘talking head’ interviews. But there are some odd-ball items at the same time. The avatar stand-in for Musk is a bit much to take. There are some sequences that resemble a violent video game where the ‘player’ is ‘taking out multiple employees’. This is to show how downsizing works, but is a bit over-the-top.

Alex Gibney has created something that begs to be seen. Yet he has constructed a major wall around his work. The length is close to four hours and that can be way more of a stretch than most people would feel comfortable sitting through. Perhaps adapting all this same footage into a three or four part limited series on HBO might have worked out better for all involved.

“Musk” is a documentary that is not a sprint. This is a full-on “Musk Marathon”. It covers, in detail, the one man in the world that nobody can ignore.