Alex Gibney’s new four-hour documentary, “Musk,” is not like any I’ve seen.
The movie combines incisive and poignant interviews in regards to the tech lord man-baby with video-game-style sequences and an uncanny Valley-esque CGI avatar of Elon Musk uttering his personal phrases in a stilted AI voice. (Musk has usually mused that we live in a simulation run by a extra superior civilization, in order that’s on level.)
There are additionally in fact, numerous clips of the actual Musk, now 55, a person who, as one in every of his many detractors within the movie places it, “is a talented inventor of his personal worth.”
“Few individuals promote themselves as egregiously as Musk,” says tech author Kara Swisher, a onetime admirer and present antagonist of Musk.
I’ll depart it to the critics to weigh the inventive deserves of Gibney’s stylistic selections — I personally didn’t love the sequences the place a ray-gun-wielding hand bursts by means of the doorways of many federal businesses (POV: Musk), vaporizing employees whereas a meter ticks up the kills. It’s, nevertheless, an apt metaphor for the violence Musk’s callow Division of Authorities Effectivity group inflicted on 1000’s of civil servants within the brutal interval after President Trump’s second inauguration.
General, I discovered the movie fascinating, scary, infuriating and never in the least reassuring about Musk, his ethics or our future. Will Musk finally use the expansive recordsdata his DOGE minions improperly downloaded to coach his incipient XAI enterprise? Nobody is aware of.
I’ve lengthy believed that cash and energy infantilize. Few males embody that notion extra totally than Musk, who’s petty to the purpose of absurdity. Through the 2023 Tremendous Bowl, for instance, he was irked that President Biden’s tweets in regards to the Philadelphia Eagles obtained extra engagement than his, so Musk flew to San Francisco and ordered his group to change the platform’s algorithm to artificially enhance the visibility of his personal posts.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk subsequent to a brand new Tesla sports activities automotive at a showroom in Menlo Park, Calif., in 2008.
(Paul Sakuma / Related Press)
This from a person who claims to have bought Twitter within the title of free speech.
Gibney’s movie does a superb job of explaining Musk’s rise: He is an efficient however not nice engineer, a horrible supervisor with a genius for self-promotion and exaggeration, notably on the subject of, say, the extremely questionable “autopilot” skill of Teslas, which has been the topic of quite a few lawsuits and multimillion-dollar payouts after deadly crashes. Tesla’s notorious 2016 video of its “Full-Self Driving” system was proved to have been staged.
“The promise is at all times illusory,” Lawrence Fossi, a former securities lawyer and Musk skeptic, tells the filmmakers.
A COVID-era political awakening — Musk was infuriated by lockdown mandates that adversely affected Tesla manufacturing — led to Musk ingratiating himself with Trump, whose reelection in 2024 successfully put an finish to dozens of Biden-era federal investigations into Musk’s corporations.
Musk’s explosive falling-out with Trump over the deficit-exploding One Massive Lovely Invoice Act was destined to be short-lived. Trump wants Musk’s political money, and Musk wants authorities money and freedom from worrying about pesky authorities investigations.
Musk was born and raised in South Africa. He arrived in Silicon Valley for graduate faculty in 1995, an opportune second for an entrepreneurial geek. He instantly dropped out of Stanford to create, along with his brother Kimbal, Zip2, an organization that principally put the Yellow Pages on-line. In 1999, Compaq purchased it for $307 million.
With Musk’s $22-million haul, he co-founded a web-based monetary companies firm that turned PayPal, which was offered to EBay for $1.5 billion.
In 2002, Musk used most of his share from that sale, $175 million, to discovered SpaceX. The objective was to scale back area transportation prices and, finally, allow the colonization of Mars, a Musk obsession stemming from his perception that the human race is headed for extinction because of declining delivery charges and existential technological threats.
“His concepts come from sci-fi,” says astrophysicist Adam Becker, who dismisses Musk’s obsession with colonizing Mars as rank fantasy. The air on Mars is poisonous, Becker says, “and the grime is made from poison.”
Former Deputy NASA Administrator Lori Garver championed the fledgling SpaceX within the face of great authorities skepticism, however is turned off by Musk’s grandiosity. “He’s not sending individuals to Mars,” Garver says dryly. “He’s speaking about it.”
President-elect Trump and Elon Musk watch the launch of the sixth check flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on Nov. 19, 2024, in Brownsville, Texas.
(Brandon Bell / Getty Photos)
After some really spectacular failures, SpaceX efficiently pioneered using reusable orbital rocket boosters, and has secured not less than $22 billion in authorities contracts. It has additionally grow to be an indispensable supplier of web service across the globe, by means of its Starlink satellites.
In 2004, Musk turned a major investor in Tesla, the electrical automotive firm based by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Eberhard says he regrets not being extra cautious of Musk, who didn’t truly “discovered” the corporate, however due to a courtroom settlement has the correct to name himself a “founder.” As Eberhard says within the movie, there’s truly no strict, authorized definition of “founder.”
About these declining delivery charges: Musk has made it his enterprise to populate as a lot of the planet as attainable. He has fathered not less than 14 youngsters with a number of ladies, and presumably many extra. He has related with many potential moms on X, which he famously bought from Twitter in 2022, whereupon its worth plummeted by 80%.
Ashley St. Clair is a onetime conservative influencer and mom of one in every of Musk’s youngsters who has refused to signal an NDA limiting her skill to speak about him. She described his direct messages to potential moms on X as “a Gatling gun of sperm.”
In an emotional interview, his first spouse, Justine Musk, a mom of six, breaks down as she discusses the dying of their first baby from issues of SIDS in 2002.
In 2016, their eldest baby, Vivian, got here out as trans. Throughout a 2024 interview with Jordan Peterson, a scientific psychologist turned right-wing tradition warrior, Musk mentioned that his baby had died, “killed by the woke thoughts virus.”
“We went by means of the dying of an precise baby,” says Justine, plainly pained by his cruelty. After Vivian got here out, Justine says, “He minimize off her medical insurance.”
Such heartlessness is nearly unimaginable, till you bear in mind Musk has argued that “the basic weak point of Western civilization is empathy.”
In “Musk,” Gibney slyly contains scenes from the 1937 film “The Man Who May Work Miracles.” Primarily based on an H.G. Wells brief story, three celestial beings select one puny mortal to grow to be all-powerful. Can a human deal with all that energy? Or will he destroy Earth as a result of he’s not sensible sufficient to anticipate what he’ll unleash?
You may most likely guess the reply.
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