AI-rewritten: This is a summary of an article from Ars Technica, rewritten by AI (Qwen, running locally) to make it easier to read. The facts come from the original article – read it for the full story.

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Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney released a four-hour documentary titled Musk that challenges Elon Musk’s public image as a visionary tech titan. The film portrays Musk less as an inventor and more as a modern confidence man whose real genius lies in pumping stocks and dazzling audiences with visions of a high-tech future. While the documentary covers well-known aspects of his life, including Tesla accidents, SpaceX, Starlink, his purchase of Twitter, his shift on AI, his embrace of Donald Trump, and his family, it has drawn ire from Musk himself and threats of a defamation lawsuit.

The film features interviews with ex-wife Justine Musk, Kara Swisher, Geoffrey Hinton, and others, while David Byrne co-wrote an original song for the soundtrack. Gibney used AI to create a version of Musk uttering verbatim public quotes since the real man declined to be interviewed. However, reviewers note that the documentary feels like two different films. The first half focuses on his early entrepreneurial years with archival footage, while the second half becomes markedly more adversarial after his purchase of Twitter and embrace of Trump.

Gibney revealed during a post-screening Q&A that he finished the film in 2024 but continued shooting to document Musk’s "heel turn." The nearly four-hour runtime includes a ten-minute intermission, leading Gibney to joke that it could easily have been stretched to six hours as a miniseries. The AI version of Musk is described as creepy and lacking compared to the archival footage of the actual man. The film will open broadly across the US on October 14, 2026, in select theaters in New York and Los Angeles first.