Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary Musk premiered at the Venice Film Festival, drawing critical acclaim alongside immediate legal threats from tech billionaire Elon Musk. The film explores Musk’s rise, his political shift, and allegations regarding self-driving technology, sparking a high-stakes clash over free speech, defamation, and public influence.
Venice Film Festival Premiere and the Legal Battle
Alex Gibney’s sprawling four-hour documentary Musk debuted at the Venice Film Festival to a five-minute standing ovation, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and heads next to Toronto before opening in U.S. theaters on Oct. 16. Before the film even reached the public, the production received a formal warning letter from the tech mogul’s attorney, Alex Spiro, alleging factual misrepresentations.
The legal notice specifically targeted insinuations that Musk used his Starlink satellites to influence the 2024 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. Spiro wrote to Jigsaw Productions on Sept. 3 that the insinuation is false, noting that election officials, independent cybersecurity researchers, and fact-checkers had already refuted vote-rigging claims in November 2024. NPR also reported that Musk’s legal team threatened to sue Gibney for defamation. Spiro criticized the production for “not engagingwith Musk’s team during fact-checking, writing,
As you know, we have attempted to contact you multiple times and requested an opportunity to present the facts in the normal fact-checking process that is the hallmark of ethical journalism.”
Elon Musk and Allies Fire Back on X
Musk launched a scathing series of posts on X, the platform he bought for $44bn in 2022, dismissing the documentary as a boring hit piece and labeling Gibney a bitter old man with zero integrity. Musk also amplified a post by podcaster Katie Miller—the wife of Donald Trump’s powerful adviser Stephen Miller and former communications director for Musk’s department of government efficiency
(Doge)—who complained about the alleged absence of Musk acquaintances and allies in the film, calling it a fictional movie and a hit job by a self-obsessed Hollywood director.
“Gibney has zero integrity. Zero. Fortunately, his movies are boring af … It’s a hit piece that misses, and makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours.”
Elon Musk, via The Guardian
Musk also denied claims made in the project by his former partner, the former Maga influencer Ashley St. Clair, who alleged his team offered her $40m to sign a non-disclosure agreement. She was never offered that and has a history of making false claims,
Musk wrote on X, where he additionally endorsed an image depicting a puppet chain of control involving the Democratic party, “Team Soros,Gibney, and Hollywood by simply stating:
Accurate.”
Silicon Valley Roots and Tesla Controversies
Gibney’s documentary splits its narrative evenly across Musk’s pre- and post-COVID trajectories—when it became clear that Musk’s alliance with the MAGA-fied Republican Party was far more intense than garden-variety advocacy for lower taxes and less regulation. The first half traces Musk’s beginnings as a 23-year-old co-founder of Zip2, an online equivalent of the Yellow Pages whose sale netted him a $20 million–plus payout despite the fact that Musk’s code was so gnarly and inelegant that company programmers referred to his contributions as “hair balls.”
The film delves into his brief tenure as PayPal’s CEO—a matter of months, ended when the board had him removed from his position in the middle of his honeymoon—and the founding of SpaceX. By 2010, when SpaceX completed its first launch and return of an uncrewed capsule after several fiery failures, Musk had already achieved the status of a one-man nation-state. As Gibney examines the broader empire, the film also highlights anecdotes such as Musk’s intense antipathy for the number nine, which, according to the book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, he would not allow to appear on Tesla’s website.
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