Alex Gibney’s new four-hour documentary, “Musk,” is in contrast to any I’ve seen.
The movie combines incisive and poignant interviews in regards to the tech lord man-baby with video-game-style sequences and an uncanny Valley-esque CGI avatar of Elon Musk uttering his personal phrases in a stilted AI voice. (Musk has usually mused that we live in a simulation run by a extra superior civilization, in order that’s on level.)
There are additionally in fact, numerous clips of the actual Musk, now 55, a person who, as certainly one of his many detractors within the movie places it, “is a talented inventor of his personal worth.”
“Few individuals promote themselves as egregiously as Musk,” says tech author Kara Swisher, a onetime admirer and present antagonist of Musk.
I’ll depart it to the critics to weigh the inventive deserves of Gibney’s stylistic decisions — I personally didn’t love the sequences the place a ray-gun-wielding hand bursts by the doorways of many federal businesses (POV: Musk), vaporizing employees whereas a meter ticks up the kills. It’s, nonetheless, an apt metaphor for the violence Musk’s callow Division of Authorities Effectivity group inflicted on hundreds of civil servants within the brutal interval after President Trump’s second inauguration.
Total, I discovered the movie fascinating, scary, infuriating and never in the slightest degree reassuring about Musk, his ethics or our future. Will Musk ultimately use the expansive information his DOGE minions improperly downloaded to coach his incipient XAI enterprise? Nobody is aware of.
I’ve lengthy believed that cash and energy infantilize. Few males embody that notion extra totally than Musk, who’s petty to the purpose of absurdity. Through the 2023 Tremendous Bowl, for instance, he was irked that President Biden’s tweets in regards to the Philadelphia Eagles obtained extra engagement than his, so Musk flew to San Francisco and ordered his group to change the platform’s algorithm to artificially increase the visibility of his personal posts.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk subsequent to a brand new Tesla sports activities automobile at a showroom in Menlo Park, Calif., in 2008.
(Paul Sakuma / Related Press)
This from a person who claims to have bought Twitter within the title of free speech.
Gibney’s movie does a great job of explaining Musk’s rise: He is an effective however not nice engineer, a horrible supervisor with a genius for self-promotion and exaggeration, notably relating to, say, the extremely questionable “autopilot” capacity of Teslas, which has been the topic of numerous lawsuits and multimillion-dollar payouts after deadly crashes. Tesla’s notorious 2016 video of its “Full-Self Driving” system was proved to have been staged.
“The promise is at all times illusory,” Lawrence Fossi, a former securities lawyer and Musk skeptic, tells the filmmakers.
A COVID-era political awakening — Musk was infuriated by lockdown mandates that adversely affected Tesla manufacturing — led to Musk ingratiating himself with Trump, whose reelection in 2024 successfully put an finish to dozens of Biden-era federal investigations into Musk’s corporations.
Musk’s explosive falling-out with Trump over the deficit-exploding One Massive Stunning Invoice Act was destined to be short-lived. Trump wants Musk’s political money, and Musk wants authorities money and freedom from worrying about pesky authorities investigations.
Musk was born and raised in South Africa. He arrived in Silicon Valley for graduate college in 1995, an opportune second for an entrepreneurial geek. He instantly dropped out of Stanford to create, together with his brother Kimbal, Zip2, an organization that principally put the Yellow Pages on-line. In 1999, Compaq purchased it for $307 million.
With Musk’s $22-million haul, he co-founded an internet monetary providers firm that grew to become PayPal, which was offered to EBay for $1.5 billion.
In 2002, Musk used most of his share from that sale, $175 million, to discovered SpaceX. The objective was to cut back house transportation prices and, in the end, allow the colonization of Mars, a Musk obsession stemming from his perception that the human race is headed for extinction on account of declining beginning charges and existential technological threats.
“His concepts come from sci-fi,” says astrophysicist Adam Becker, who dismisses Musk’s obsession with colonizing Mars as rank fantasy. The air on Mars is poisonous, Becker says, “and the filth is product of poison.”
Former Deputy NASA Administrator Lori Garver championed the fledgling SpaceX within the face of great authorities skepticism, however is turned off by Musk’s grandiosity. “He’s not sending individuals to Mars,” Garver says dryly. “He’s speaking about it.”
President-elect Trump and Elon Musk watch the launch of the sixth take a look at flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on Nov. 19, 2024, in Brownsville, Texas.
(Brandon Bell / Getty Pictures)
After some actually spectacular failures, SpaceX efficiently pioneered using reusable orbital rocket boosters, and has secured no less than $22 billion in authorities contracts. It has additionally turn into an indispensable supplier of web service across the globe, by its Starlink satellites.
In 2004, Musk grew to become a major investor in Tesla, the electrical automobile firm based by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Eberhard says he regrets not being extra cautious of Musk, who didn’t really “discovered” the corporate, however due to a courtroom settlement has the correct to name himself a “founder.” As Eberhard says within the movie, there’s really no strict, authorized definition of “founder.”
About these declining birth rates: Musk has made it his enterprise to populate as a lot of the planet as doable. He has fathered at least 14 children with several women, and probably many extra. He has connected with many potential mothers on X, which he famously purchased from Twitter in 2022, whereupon its worth plummeted by 80%.
Ashley St. Clair is a onetime conservative influencer and mom of certainly one of Musk’s kids who has refused to sign an NDA limiting her capacity to speak about him. She described his direct messages to potential moms on X as “a Gatling gun of sperm.”
In an emotional interview, his first spouse, Justine Musk, a mom of six, breaks down as she discusses the dying of their first little one from issues of SIDS in 2002.
In 2016, their eldest little one, Vivian, got here out as trans. Throughout a 2024 interview with Jordan Peterson, a medical psychologist turned right-wing tradition warrior, Musk mentioned that his little one had died, “killed by the woke mind virus.”
“We went by the dying of an precise little one,” says Justine, plainly pained by his cruelty. After Vivian got here out, Justine says, “He minimize off her medical health insurance.”
Such heartlessness is sort of unimaginable, till you keep in mind Musk has argued that “the basic weak point of Western civilization is empathy.”
In “Musk,” Gibney slyly contains scenes from the 1937 film “The Man Who May Work Miracles.” Primarily based on an H.G. Wells quick story, three celestial beings select one puny mortal to turn into all-powerful. Can a human deal with all that energy? Or will he destroy Earth as a result of he’s not good sufficient to anticipate what he’ll unleash?
You may in all probability guess the reply.
Bluesky: @rabcarian
Threads: @rabcarian
