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Elon Musk is reportedly taking legal action against a documentary about him after its buzz-filled debut this week, slamming director Alex Gibney as a “horrible human” on social media.
The world’s richest man is the subject of director Gibney’s Musk, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday and received a five-minute-long standing ovation.
Critics say the film, which clocks in at nearly four hours, is an incisive look at a man who has built a career as a far-right provocateur and head of a trillion-dollar tech empire through multiple companies, ever-shifting tech promises and aligning himself with powerful figures such as U.S. President Donald Trump.
The Guardian said Tuesday that it was an “epic study of the world’s richest and most banal man,” while Deadline said it depicted Musk as “petty, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, cruel, detached from humans at a personal level (including various ex-partners and many of his children) while purporting to want to save humanity by colonizing Mars,” calling it “the takedown he richly deserves.”
Musk will have its Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 14.
When the documentary was first announced in 2023, Musk called it a “hit piece,” a characterization he has repeated multiple times on social media in the past week.
Since Tuesday, Elon Musk has posted a flurry of replies on X agreeing with supporters criticizing the documentary, calling the film “boring,” and saying Gibney “lacks integrity” and is a “bitter old man who lost the plot long ago,” among other insults.
Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro issued a letter to the production, according to The Hollywood Reporter, putting them on formal legal notice and stating that Spiro would proceed with legal action if the production did not “check [their] facts with the people who know them.”
Jigsaw Productions issued a statement to The Hollywood Reporter defending the film’s accuracy and stating that Musk should be championing the productions’ right to examine powerful figures, as “a free speech absolutist.”
CBC News reached out to Spiro and Jigsaw Productions, but had not heard back by publication time.
Film tracks childhood to tech empire
Gibney, whose previous films have investigated Scientology, Enron and Casino Jack Abramoff, among other targets, said in Venice before the film’s premiere that he believes Musk is “extremely” dangerous to democracy.
It’s unclear if Musk has actually seen the film. In the documentary, an AI avatar of Musk mouths along to quotes that Musk has said in the past, an eerie choice that Gibney said was to convey, “the reality of what he’s done and the unreality of his narrative.”
The film traces Musk’s life from his childhood in South Africa to his rise through startups Zip2 and PayPal onto Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, X and his AI aspirations, while also digging into his alliance with Trump and his chaotic tenure as part of the Department of Government Efficiency, where he helped gut the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — an action that researchers say has already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide.
Law professor Kristen Thomasen says preventing the sharing of non-consensual deepfakes on X will likely require government legislation, warning it’s a structural issue that users have limited means to solve.
The documentary puts its largest focus on Tesla and the company’s safety claims related to its self-driving technology, digging into lawsuits and tracking Musk’s shifting promises about the capability and safety of the technology across his pursuit of a fully autonomous vehicle.
Those interviewed in the documentary include Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, Musk’s first wife Justine Musk, neurologist Sam Harris, tech reporter Kara Swisher and former USAID administrator Samantha Power.
Ashley St. Clair, a former conservative MAGA influencer and former girlfriend of Musk, also appeared in the film. They have one child together, born in 2024.
She joined Gibney at the Venice Film Festival, alleging that she was offered $40 million US to sign a nondisclosure agreement and not speak in the film.
Musk replied to a TMZ report about the alleged NDA, denying that he ever offered her money and claiming she “has a history of making false claims.”
The film goes into Musk’s takeover of X and what Gibney says is the manipulation of the algorithm. WIRED reporter Zoe Schiffer, who also appears in the film, said at the news conference before the premiere that Musk has “tweaked the algorithm” in favour of “the more inflammatory comments and voices on that platform.”
At the same conference, St. Clair said that she believes Musk is stoking fires and “causing deliberate division that could be catastrophic if it’s not regulated or contained.”
The film will be released in select theatres in North America on Oct. 16., with a wider rollout following on Oct. 23.
