In a matter of days, Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk documentary will premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It’s called Musk. There will be a shorter version for Venice, Toronto and the theatrical release, then there will be a four-hour version for HBO. Gibney is a longtime documentary filmmaker and he literally spent years following Elon Musk around and documenting the people in his bizarre, ethno-fascist orbit. The Hollywood Reporter’s cover story this week is a preview of the documentary, with extensive comments from Gibney about what he learned from spending so much time in Elon’s orbit. This THR piece is chilling. I can only imagine how absolutely bonkers the documentary is.

What is the documentary’s thesis? [‘Musk’ is] an adventurous but methodical movie grounded in the thesis that, as [Gibney] sees it, a dangerous huckster is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data. Gibney’s basic take on Musk is that he’s a confidence man whose power comes only from the stock market and disappears the minute we see through the facade of sales pitches — but can do a whole lot of damage until that happens.

Musk’s pre-Trump sins: 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.

Musk’s ultimate goal is world domination. In Gibney’s telling, to witness Musk, intentionally or not, 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.

Musk’s ex-lover says Musk rigged the 2024 election: Musk ex and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, a central figure in the documentary, describes the events of Trump’s election in November 2024. Musk, she says, had a “degree of certainty” about the results before they came in that “I had never seen before.” “He had told me [before the election] he was going to unleash the ‘anomaly in the matrix,’ ” she recounts, as a text exchange between them pops up onscreen backing up the claim. We see Musk telling her, “I have ten thousand lasers in space.” “So you think he was referring to Starlink?” Gibney asks off-camera. St. Clair replies, “I mean, I don’t know where else he has space lasers.” Gibney leaves the insinuation hanging — was this a troll or a confession? — but hints he is taking it seriously when he then says in his patented voiceover, “What is Elon building, what are his goals, what are his actual motivations, and do we even know this man at all?”

What DOGE was really doing: The other piece of the electoral-manipulation insinuation looks not backward but forward and suggests that Musk’s four-month stint in Washington last year did more than gleefully ax 270,000 federal employees and untold billions in life-saving aid (though a section on the latter, anchored by former USAID chief Samantha Power, lands with an outraging wallop). During that time, Gibney suggests, Musk also had access to and potentially collected intimate data on tens of millions of Americans possibly even for later political use. In a follow-up email, Gibney explains further: “We don’t know what DOGE/Musk did with the data to which they had access. What we do know — via my own source who ran IT at a major federal agency and via the whistleblowers and public accounts — is that the DOGE Boys had Super Admin status to federal IT systems. 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 of salting away data squares with a whistleblower complaint filed by the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer.)

What if Musk/DOGE fed all federal records into AI systems? Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-prize-winning godfather of AI, offers a specific use case: leveraging the data into an unfair campaign advantage. “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he says onscreen. “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.”

Another thesis statement. Sam Harris, the right-leaning podcaster and friend turned enemy of Musk, lays out this theme onscreen near the end of the film. “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,” he says. “It’s completely insane we have one person who’s this chaotic — who’s completely unelected — and has this much power.”

This is an important point: Gibney makes it clear that he doesn’t think such voices are hyperbolic, and that it is only a certain kind of American heuristic that prevents us from hearing them. “People assume because he’s very rich that he’s not crazy,” he 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.”

Gibney on the point of unmasking Elon: “The Great and Terrible Oz kept people in check because they were afraid of his visage that loomed over everybody, and he used that power to exert an enormous amount of control,” Gibney tells me. “But when a little dog pulled aside the curtain, and you can see a frumpy man operating gears and levers, suddenly he wasn’t so terrible and he wasn’t so great.”

[From THR]

I think this is where a lot of people reflexively fall: “People assume because he’s very rich that he’s not crazy.” It’s the same with Trump, another con man, liar and fascist. People think “oh, if he has money, there’s some part of him that’s successful, normal and sane.” This is not the case with Musk and Trump. As for Musk’s alleged election interference in 2024 – that’s been on the edge of the conversation ever since Election Night 2024. Few will say it aloud. I haven’t heard one elected Democrat say it aloud. After the documentary comes out, will we finally be able to talk about it?

Elon Musk is the richest man on earth. An explosive new film from Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney suggests he may also be the most dangerous.

“As he accretes more power, he’s no longer interested in checking his worst impulses,” Gibney says, reflecting on Musk’s trajectory.… pic.twitter.com/mpafpvg8t4

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) September 2, 2026

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.