If you’re not deterred by facing a portrait (not a hagiography) of Elon Musk lasting three and a half hours, know that director Alex Gibney unveiled yesterday at the Venice Film Festival 2026, out of competition, the documentary Musk, from which the first teaser trailer has been released, which you can see below. The feature will arrive in American theaters on October 16, ready to spark debate, perhaps even from Elon himself, who in recent months and years has never held back his opinions on others’ cinema… and in this instance he is directly involved.
Musk, how director Alex Gibney describes his work
For his Musk, the director Alex Gibney describes his approach this way: an attempt to dismantle another director’s frame, the one Elon Musk himself has imposed to frame his own image, managing to market himself as a “modern Leonardo da Vinci, capable of answering every question, tirelessly at work to save the planet and transform humanity into a multiplanetary species.” The film, Gibney says, instead seeks to recount the biography of the magnate and entrepreneur once more, this time choosing to start from the bottom, “without being hypnotized”: “Toto’s perspective, the dog from The Wizard of Oz. Rather than remaining hypnotized by the magician’s suspended face, Toto glimpses the feet stirring at the edge of the curtain: once the drape is drawn aside, levers and gears appear operated by a ordinary man in a desperate attempt to project a fictitious grandeur.” The documentary traces Musk’s ascent and the rise of his companies Tesla and SpaceX in the public discourse, not to mention the acquisition of X, the former Twitter.
In short, to the filmmaker who has told stories about Frank Sinatra, Scientology, computer viruses, Russian oligarchs, Boris Becker, and Paul Simon, Elon Musk as a phenomenon matters, and the decidedly non-neutral angle is sure to provoke some reaction.
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