Alex Gibney Brings a Four-Hour Reckoning With Elon Musk to Venice

Venice does not usually hand its out-of-competition marquee to a nearly four-hour documentary, and it rarely aims one squarely at the most powerful private citizen on earth. It has done both. Musk, Alex Gibney’s portrait of Elon Musk, world-premiered out of competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival — 225 minutes, an intermission built in — and it arrives with none of the deference its subject is used to commanding. Gibney calls it a definitive and unvarnished examination of a man whose fortune has become political power; the film’s argument is that the two can no longer be told apart.

If anyone has the standing to try, it is Gibney. He is the documentarian who took apart Enron, the Church of Scientology in Going Clear, and Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos in The Inventor, and who won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side. His method is accretion — testimony, document, timeline — until a portrait becomes a case. He began this one long before Musk’s turn as a political operator was fully visible, and the film treats that turn as its spine.

What the film maps is the migration of a car-and-rocket entrepreneur into a right-wing political force: the acquisition of a social platform, the amplification it enabled, the money and attention pointed at elections on more than one continent. Gibney’s case is not that Musk is a showman but that he is consequential — that a private individual now exercises the kind of leverage over public life that used to belong to states. It is a thesis designed to provoke, and the first reviews out of the Lido have described a portrait that gives its subject very little quarter.

Recommended Reading‘Elon Musk’, a Biography by Walter Isaacson

Gibney has not made it dry. David Byrne wrote an original song for the film with the composer Daniel Pemberton — Let Me Sell You a Dream, its lyrics assembled from Musk’s own words — a flourish that signals the register: not a prosecutor’s brief but a portrait with a point of view and a sense of showmanship of its own. At 225 minutes the film asks for a commitment most documentaries would not dare request, and the intermission is an admission that this is less an article than an epic.

The rollout is as ambitious as the runtime. Bleecker Street opens Musk in American cinemas in October; HBO Documentary Films, which pre-bought the television and streaming rights years ago, will carry it after that, with Universal handling it internationally. A four-hour, adversarial documentary getting a theatrical release at all is a bet on the subject’s gravitational pull — the same pull the film sets out to anatomise. Venice, by putting it on this stage, has decided that a reckoning with Musk is festival business, not merely news.

Musk plays out of competition, so it is not in the Golden Lion race; its verdict will be rendered by audiences when it reaches cinemas. There was a fitting rhyme on the same day: in competition, Venice premiered a fiction about an architect hired to build one tech billionaire’s doomsday bunker.

Tags: documentary, Venice Film Festival, 2026, Elon Musk, Alex Gibney, Musk

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