The documentary ‘Musk’ brings together the magnate’s inner circle in Venice: “He lives in unreality”

Elon Musk is well portrayed in the new documentary dedicated to him by Alex Gibney, which premiered this Tuesday at the Venice Film Festival. The Oscar-winning American documentarian—who won the statuette in 2008 for exposing the tortures by the U.S. military in Guantánamo and Afghanistan—has crafted a four-hour film that begins by focusing on the young and entrepreneurial Musk, the inventor aiming to save the planet, a great capitalist who does not allow himself to fail and is willing to colonize Texas to carry out his particular space race. But the film ends by warning of the great danger the character currently poses, not only to the democracy of his country but on a global scale.

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Through multiple interviews and with testimony from technology journalists who closely followed his career and his takeover of Twitter, as well as from his ex-wife Justin, with whom he had six children, and influencer Ashley St Claire, mother of another of them, the documentary director constructs a narrative about Musk’s supposed intentions when participating in Tesla, founding SpaceX, acquiring Twitter, or financing Trump, and the reality that resulted from all this: rechargeable electric batteries that were never manufactured, autopilots that caused deaths, space satellites and a social network with global control purposes… or his entrance into the political scene like a bull in a china shop.

In reality, his greatest revelation is that Musk’s story is not a new technological story, Gibney assures. “His story is that of something old presented in a new package,” says Gibney at the Lido. “In the end, his story turns out to be the story of the con artist, the speculator who inflates stock prices. His wealth and power come from shares whose value has been inflated. And that is a story that had already been told before, with Enron and Elizabeth Holmes.”

The initial intention, the filmmaker says, was to make a shorter film. But this was before Elon Musk became fully involved in Donald Trump’s political trajectory and the presidency of the United States. The magnate, in any case, refused to be interviewed for the film, so an avatar was used to deliver Musk’s phrases, “those things that have a certain air of unreality.”

The use of the avatar and some of the resources typical of video games is an attempt to enter Elon’s world. “At the beginning of the film, he talks about how it is almost certain that we live in a simulation. A simulation created by some kind of intelligence from the future. And he also talks about life as a kind of existential video game. In that context, it seemed fair and reasonable to enter that terrain. He is obsessed with playing video games and I think for him it is a kind of escape mechanism. He says it calms his demons. But I also think it is a way he invests in unreality,” Gibney agrees.

Another thing that caught Gibney’s attention was that when he tried to get people to talk, there was a huge fear of doing so. “Almost an existential fear. Both among people who were critical of him, as well as among his business partners and friends. I spoke with many, but very few, except some of the brave people here, agreed to talk.

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The people who came with Gibney to the Venice Film Festival to support the film are journalist Zöe Schiffer, who became one of the leading experts in independently and internally covering the chaos of Musk’s management after buying Twitter (now X), and his ex-partner Ashley St Claire, whom Musk made sign a contract when she was about to give birth to their son. He apparently understands intimate relationships as business transactions.

Schiffer notes that while Musk has a lot of loyalty in the upper echelons of his companies, because he fills boards of directors with friends and colleagues, at lower levels he does little to generate loyalty. “He treats people quite harshly. And especially when he arrives at a new organization, like USDS or Twitter, there is a feeling that it is a takeover, and the people who were already there feel that something bad is happening. And those people were quite willing to talk.”

“In my case it was a bit different,” adds St Claire, “because I was offered the opportunity not to speak in exchange for 40 million dollars. And when you are offered something like that, it really makes you question what your word means and how much it is worth. And why they want to offer me such an amount of money not to speak. Elon maintains complicated relationships in general, but his most complicated relationship is with the truth. And above all, I think I want to give my children the example that material comfort should never be put before telling the truth,” adds the influencer.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, somewhat on a whim, his intention, at least in his mind, was that he was reclaiming a refuge for freedom of expression. Since then, he has modified the algorithm, first to reduce the visibility of conventional journalism, explains Schiffer, and then to boost some of the most incendiary comments and voices on that platform.

“Also, and Ashley knows this well, he spends a disproportionate amount of time on X, and I really think that has affected his perception of reality. He also has much greater weight than anyone else within the algorithm. So anything he promotes or tweets then receives an additional boost from the algorithm itself.”

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