Alex Gibney's 'Lacerating' Elon Musk Documentary Shocks Venice Film Festival With Bombshell Revelations About His Life and Career

A new "lacerating" documentary about Elon Musk premiered at the Venice Film Festival to strong reviews and a lengthy ovation, even as its subject launched a public campaign against it.

Musk, directed by Oscar winner Alex Gibney, screened on Tuesday, September 8, ahead of an October theatrical release, drawing praise from critics who described it as a damning portrait of the world's richest man.

Musk, who did not attend, attacked the film and its director online, and his attorney has sent the production a legal threat letter disputing one of its claims.

The nearly four-hour documentary, which runs 225 minutes with an intermission, earned a standing ovation at its premiere. Critics were largely positive even as they called the portrait unsettling.

The Hollywood Reporter's review described the film as a portrait of a figure given too much power to be stopped, while other outlets called it "damning" and "distressing."

Gibney spent close to four years on the project, which he began in 2022 and repeatedly expanded as Musk became more deeply involved in global politics.

The director has said the film is less a biography than an investigation into how Musk accumulated such extraordinary influence across Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, the platform X, and American politics.

At a Venice press conference, Gibney compared Musk's story to those of earlier subjects he has documented, including the collapse of Enron and the fraud case against Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, framing Musk as what he called a modern confidence man.

The film makes a series of pointed claims about Musk's businesses. Experts featured in the documentary allege that Tesla misrepresented the range of its vehicle's batteries and abandoned a promised battery-swapping network, and the film raises questions about how much data Tesla collects from its vehicles. It also examines Musk's political rise and his role in President Donald Trump's movement.

The documentary draws on interviews with people close to Musk. Among them are his first wife, Justine Musk; his father, Errol Musk; former girlfriend Ashley St. Clair; AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton and Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard.

Ashley, who shares a child with Elon, repeated at the Venice press conference her claim that she was offered a $40 million nondisclosure agreement, an assertion Elon has denied.

Elon, who has said he hadn't yet seen the film, responded with a series of combative posts on X aimed largely at Alex. He called the director a "horrible human" with "zero integrity" and dismissed the documentary as a "boring hit piece," arguing that Alex had assembled interviewees with grievances against him. Elon has criticized the project publicly since it was announced in 2023.

His pushback has extended to a legal threat. Elon's attorney, Alex Spiro, sent the production a letter, confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter, disputing what he described as the film's insinuation that Elon used his Starlink satellites to influence the 2024 presidential election in Donald's favor. Alex wrote that the claim is false, that officials and researchers publicly refuted a Starlink vote-rigging theory in late 2024, and that nothing had since revived it.

The film includes a comment from Ashley recalling that Elon mentioned an "anomaly in the matrix" before the election.

Musk is set to open in U.S. theaters on October 16, with a later broadcast planned, and Elon's vocal opposition could very well draw more attention to it.

Alex is an Academy Award winner, taking home the prize for his 2007 film Taxi to the Dark Side and investigations into subjects ranging from Scientology to Theranos. Elon, 54, leads Tesla and SpaceX and owns X, and has become one of the most influential and polarizing figures in business and politics.

Neither Alex nor the film's distributor has indicated any change to the release plans in response to Elon's threats.