Critic's Notebook

Gregg Segal

When Alex Gibney announced on X that he was making a documentary about Elon Musk, his prospective subject promptly quote-posted the filmmaker and declared the forthcoming film a hit piece. The exchange, naturally, makes it into “Musk,” Mr. Gibney’s nearly four-hour examination of the world’s richest man and perhaps its most consequential professional narcissist. Why should Mr. Musk assume that one of the most celebrated documentarians of our time (full disclosure: I profiled Mr. Gibney for The Star-Ledger’s monthly magazine more than a decade ago) would produce anything but an impartial account? Perhaps he recognizes, somewhere beneath the layers of self-regard, that certain things are difficult to explain away. When you perform what looks unmistakably like a Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s second inauguration, for instance, you cannot reasonably expect everyone to regard you as a misunderstood visionary.

Mr. Musk, who declined to participate in the film, has effectively left Mr. Gibney to reconstruct him from the public record. The filmmaker’s solution is an artificial-intelligence-generated avatar of Mr. Musk, assembled from the real man’s recorded statements and interviews, which answers questions the flesh-and-blood original refused to entertain. The device is at once an ingenious workaround and an ethical headache. There is, after all, a difference between quoting someone’s words and manufacturing a performance of that person saying them. Paraphrase is ubiquitous in journalism; a synthetic human likeness is something else. Mr. Gibney takes pains to disclose the artifice, and his digital Mr. Musk has a disproportionately large head that makes the resemblance faintly grotesque, if not immediately unmistakable. The film even turns its subject’s faith in technological wizardry against him: what could be more appropriate than confronting a tech bro with his own artificial double?

Still, transparency is not the same thing as ethical absolution. Mr. Gibney is clearly anxious to avoid the controversy that surrounded “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” which used an A.I.-generated voice to recite words Bourdain had written but not spoken. Yet the distinction between synthetic speech and synthetic presence is not quite as reassuring as the disclaimers might suggest. The avatar does not merely reproduce Mr. Musk’s public statements; it gives them a new context, a new cadence, and the appearance of an interlocutor participating in a conversation that never happened. A documentary filmmaker has every right to interpret a subject’s words, but should he also be allowed to put those words in the subject’s digitally reconstructed mouth? Mr. Gibney’s device is defensible as a response to Mr. Musk’s refusal to cooperate, but it remains an unsettling concession to the very technological hubris the film sets out to expose. In trying to puncture Mr. Musk’s mythology, Mr. Gibney manufactures a little mythology of his own.

The film’s more persuasive work lies in dismantling the mythology of the self-made genius. It traces Mr. Musk’s rise to wealth through the dot-com boom of the 1990s, beginning with Zip2, his online business directory that Compaq acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr. Musk used his proceeds to finance X.com, the online financial-services company that eventually became part of PayPal. From there, his money helped propel him into electric vehicles, commercial spaceflight, and the other ventures through which he fashioned himself into a latter-day Leonardo da Vinci. But the film’s cumulative effect is to suggest that Mr. Musk’s most formidable talent has never been invention so much as the appropriation of other people’s work, the manipulation of institutions, and the conversion of audacious promises into personal legend.

Tesla, for example, was founded by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning before Mr. Musk became its dominant public face. The distinction between founding a company and becoming synonymous with it is precisely the kind of detail that tends to disappear when a wealthy executive is allowed to narrate his own history. Mr. Musk has repeatedly benefited from a system in which the person with the most money and the loudest megaphone gets to decide who deserves credit. Even his ventures that purport to liberate humanity from its earthly limitations have relied on earthly assistance, including government contracts and public subsidies. Barack Obama’s administration embraced the promise of private spaceflight, helping support a commercial space industry in which Mr. Musk would become a dominant figure. The irony is difficult to miss: the supposed embodiment of rugged entrepreneurial independence has long depended on public institutions to help finance his grandest ambitions.

Mr. Musk’s genius, as Mr. Gibney presents it, is less a matter of engineering than of engineering perception. He knows how to make the future sound inevitable, how to turn a speculative product into an impending revolution, and how to present himself as the indispensable man who alone can deliver it. The actual achievements are not necessarily imaginary, but the film asks us to distinguish between what Mr. Musk’s companies have accomplished and the extravagant claims through which he has marketed them. In this telling, the visionary is also a salesman, and the salesman has proved considerably more successful at selling the vision than at fulfilling every promise attached to it.

Mr. Musk’s greatest invention may be the idea of Elon Musk.

The personal testimony is less concerned with business mythology than with the people required to live inside it. Justine Musk, his first wife, describes a marriage marked by belittlement and emotional manipulation. Ashley St. Clair, a former conservative influencer with whom Mr. Musk had a child, offers her own account of a man seemingly unable or unwilling to extend empathy when it conflicts with his interests. Their testimonies are painful not merely because they reveal an unpleasant private character behind the public persona, but because they suggest that the habits rewarded in business — domination, emotional detachment, the insistence on having the final word — can become instruments of control in intimate relationships, too.

The film does not need to diagnose Mr. Musk to make its case. What emerges from these accounts is a pattern in which other people are expected to accommodate his desires, while their own needs are treated as obstacles to be managed. The contradiction is especially stark in a man who has repeatedly invoked the survival of humanity as a justification for his ambitions. One can dream of colonizing Mars while remaining indifferent to the people sharing one’s life; apparently, the species is easier to love in the abstract than any individual member of it.

Mr. Musk’s transformation during the Covid pandemic provides another turning point in the film’s account, though the temptation to treat the pandemic as the moment when everything went wrong should be resisted. The pandemic did not invent the entitlement of the mega-rich; it made that entitlement harder to disguise. For people accustomed to having the world rearranged around their preferences, even temporary constraints could register as intolerable infringements on liberty. The billionaire’s experience of inconvenience became, in his own telling, a struggle against tyranny. It is a peculiarly privileged form of radicalization: the moment the world stops accommodating you, you begin to suspect that the world has become corrupt.

The film’s portrait grows more disturbing as Mr. Musk’s ambitions move beyond cars and rockets into social media, politics, and the infrastructure of public life. His acquisition of Twitter, its subsequent transformation into X, and his increasingly conspicuous alignment with President Trump reveal the consequences of allowing private wealth to accumulate power without commensurate accountability. The self-proclaimed champion of humanity is now in a position to influence not only what people buy or what technologies they use, but also what information they encounter and how governments function. The gulf between the grandiosity of his stated mission and the pettiness of his public conduct becomes harder to ignore. A man who would like to shepherd civilization into the stars appears, here on Earth, remarkably susceptible to the basest forms of political grievance.

The problem is not simply that Mr. Musk is a hypocrite, or even that he may be less brilliant than his admirers believe. Hypocrisy can be exposed; mediocrity can be forgiven. The more consequential question is why so many powerful people were willing to mistake his confidence for competence, his wealth for proof of wisdom, and his promises for achievements. Mr. Musk did not manufacture his own mythology in a vacuum. Investors, politicians, journalists, and consumers helped sustain it, often because they wanted to believe in the same fantasy: that an exceptional individual, operating beyond the ordinary constraints of democratic accountability, could solve problems that collective institutions had failed to address. His rise is a story not only of personal ambition but of collective abdication.

This is where the film’s punishing length becomes both an asset and a liability. At 225 minutes, plus a 10-minute intermission, “Musk” is an epic in the literal sense: a sprawling biography of a man whose reach extends across industries, institutions, and the political imagination. Mr. Gibney’s exhaustive accumulation of evidence makes it difficult to maintain the convenient separation between the public benefactor and the private bully, the technological visionary and the political provocateur. Yet the sheer volume of damning material occasionally threatens to become an argument by exhaustion. For viewers already familiar with Mr. Musk’s public behavior, the film’s revelations may feel less revelatory than cumulative. We know the individual outrages; what Mr. Gibney supplies is the suffocating sense of their totality.

At this year’s Venice Film Festival, “Musk” and Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s “Dau” shared an unusual feature: both were epic-length biographies with timed intermissions, complete with countdowns, recalling the device built into Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” which played the festival two years earlier. The comparison is illuminating, even if the films operate in very different registers. “Dau” and “The Brutalist” construct fictional worlds around men whose genius, obsessions, and capacity for destruction are inseparable. Their protagonists are tormented figures, often terrible in their own right, whose ambitions acquire a tragic grandeur. Mr. Gibney’s documentary works in the opposite direction. Its subject has spent a career persuading the world that he belongs among the great makers and thinkers of history; the film methodically strips away the mystique, leaving a man whose most extraordinary accomplishment may be his ability to persuade others that he is extraordinary.

There is something almost comical about the discrepancy between the scale of Mr. Musk’s self-conception and the smallness of the behavior the film records. He wants to save civilization, colonize another planet, and reshape the future of humanity, yet remains mired in familiar vanities: the need for credit, the intolerance of dissent, the conviction that other people exist to serve his purposes. His story is less a tragedy of genius corrupted by power than a demonstration of what happens when power mistakes itself for genius in the first place.

The real subject of “Musk,” then, is not Elon Musk alone. It is the elaborate social arrangement that allows a man to become so rich, so influential, and so convinced of his own indispensability that the ordinary rules of accountability seem no longer to apply to him. Mr. Gibney’s artificial avatar is an apt, if ethically uneasy, emblem of that arrangement: a manufactured likeness built from the subject’s own words, made to perform the role he refuses to play. It is a reminder that the Musk mythology has always depended on a certain kind of ventriloquism, with admirers, institutions, and investors speaking through the image of a singular genius.

By the end, the most astonishing thing about Mr. Musk is not that he has accumulated so much power, but that so many people helped him do it. The man may be larger than life, but the mechanisms of his ascent are painfully ordinary. His genius, if the word still applies, lies in having persuaded the world to confuse the two.