“Elon is a nuke.” This assessment comes from Ashley St Clair, a former conservative influencer and one of Elon Musk’s former partners. Her perspective serves as a key contribution to Alex Gibney’s expansive four-hour documentary, which scrutinizes the life of the South African-born billionaire. The film portrays Musk as a polarizing figure—an ersatz visionary and political player who controls major assets including Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, the social platform X, and the AI firm Grok.
Gibney’s film draws parallels between Musk and the protagonist of the 1936 film The Man Who Could Work Miracles, suggesting a comparison between a banal individual granted godlike power and the billionaire’s own sci-fi-inspired ambitions. While the director does not secure an interview with Musk himself, he employs a photorealistic CG avatar to recite public statements attributed to the mogul—a stylistic choice that the film utilizes alongside interviews with professional associates and Musk’s father, Errol, who discusses the entrepreneur’s formative years in South Africa.
The documentary provides a personal look at Musk’s life through his first wife, Justine Musk (née Wilson). She recounts the tragic loss of their infant child to SIDS, expressing deep hurt over Musk’s public grandstanding regarding the event, which she notes occurred in her arms rather than his. She also criticizes his later social media comments regarding their transgender daughter, whom he claimed had “died” due to the “woke mind virus.” The film further touches on Musk’s complex family life, including reports of compounds built for his extended family.
Tracing his career trajectory, the film follows Musk from his early days as a tech innovator in the 1990s—founding an online directory and participating in the growth of PayPal—to his emergence as a darling of the liberal establishment during the Obama era. However, the narrative shifts as Musk’s relationship with the Biden administration soured, leading him to pivot toward supporting Donald Trump in 2024. This political alignment resulted in his appointment to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).
The film argues that Musk’s oversight of the Doge unit has negatively impacted the U.S. deficit, alleging that the mass dismissal of revenue officers and the potential mishandling of sensitive social security data have caused significant harm. Gibney contrasts Musk with other fallen tech figures like Elizabeth Holmes or Sam Bankman-Fried, noting that while those individuals were often viewed as illusionists, Musk maintains actual, profitable industrial success through companies like Tesla and SpaceX.
Ultimately, the documentary frames Musk as a uniquely disruptive force whose potential collapse would send shockwaves through Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. Despite the film’s extensive scope, it leaves some questions unanswered, such as the specific circumstances behind Musk’s physical transformation over the decades. The project, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, remains an absorbing, if critical, study of a man whose influence continues to shape modern global infrastructure and political discourse. The report also notes that she is a fascinating expert witness in Alex Gibney’s four-hour epic study of the world’s richest and dullest man: the overgrown brattish South-African-born trillionaire plutocrat, ersatz visionary and Trump courtier who owns Tesla cars, SpaceX rocket ships, Starlink satellites on which nation states’ military capabilities are increasingly reliant, X (formerly Twitter) which shapes the collective “incel” id of. The report also notes that billions and GrokAI whose vast server farms daily guzzle oceans of precious water. The report also notes that efficiently designed, destructive, seemingly unguided and uncontrolled, he does indeed look like a nuke. The report also notes that although we don’t get to hear about the mysterious process that changed a balding youngster into a follicularly unchallenged mature man, gibney’s excellent film covers a lot of ground in its extraordinary story. The report also notes that grinning and giggling and smirking on a thousand sycophantic podcasts like a modern, hyper-evolved version of Anthony Trollope’s wealthy charlatan Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now, musk is a uniquely disquieting baseball-capped figure. The report also notes that but given Musk’s boyish love of space travel and sci-fi, Gibney wittily compares him to the hero of the 1936 film version of HG Wells’s The Man Who Could Work Miracles about godlike space aliens who capriciously confer supernatural powers on a banal, ordinary earthling. The report also notes that he creates a photorealistic CG avatar who mouths all the things the man himself is reported as saying (a rather contrived visual joke, actually, which the film didn’t need), gibney doesn’t get to talk to Musk (or Trump) though in the spirit of Musk’s AI interests. The report also notes that much later, Musk showed a creepy enthusiasm for procreating many children with various women; Musk reportedly built compounds for his extended families like something from The Handmaid’s Tale.
