Review | Manic Boom and Bust

Boom! Oops, there goes another one over the Santa Barbara skies, courtesy of the world’s richest man. As we all know too well, as Santa Barbarans and as global citizens, Elon Musk is out to take over the world and has taken on the skies with his SpaceX company, shooting off its rockets and its corporate mouth from Vandenberg and elsewhere. That pressing and oppressive fact makes the startling and illuminating documentary Musk a film of local-global interest.

Noted documentarian Alex Gibney — behind such eye-openers as Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Man in the Room, and his take on the Elizabeth Holmes saga, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley — has pieced together a probing and as behind-the-scenes-as-he-can-get chronicle of the mysterious man and the mythic portrait of Musk. Critics are mostly onboard with their kudos for his four-hour epic (with a pee-break intermission) and Musk himself sneers at and disavows the film — a strong left-handed endorsement of its worth.

Gibney’s portrait of the man doesn’t rank highly on the objective journalism meter but falls into the category of slanted but necessary truth-to-power investigative work — and with creative juju in the mix. As Gibney explains, in the first of his many narration bits along the way, he wanted to explore “the idea of his being a genius, who made up the rules as he went along.” Musk himself, through all of his mad genius/huckster on high adventures, is desperate to be viewed primarily as an engineer. “I have to look like an engineer,” he tells a handler, “an engineer is as close to a magician than anything else in the world.”

By uncovering the deeper and darker aspects of Musk’s unprecedented rise to power and influence over the world — and the universe! — Gibney serves up admirable service in a time of machinery-enabled untruths and rampant power grabbing at the top. Among the truth detective elements in the documentary, Gibney gets some valuable insight and Intel from such sources as the real inventor source behind Tesla, Martin Eberhard, who was gruffly shoved off of his CEO and original creator throne by Musk, and Elon’s ex-wife Justine Musk, who sheds light on the psychological and emotional innards of the man. Musk has shuffled through partners — “breeders” — and doubled down on his procreative prolixity, not wanting to squander his self-described superior sperm by creating “legions” of children.

There is also a critical sidebar on his outspoken son-turned-daughter, Vivian, now estranged from her father, who decries the transgender population as an unfortunate product of the “woke mind virus.” That particular dispassion was an influence on his mad shift to supporting Trump, and then commandeering his new plaything, as a destructive force at the head of the demonic DOGE. As is said of Musk’s infamous chainsaw-wielding antics at a rally, “a chainsaw is a perfect metaphor” for Musk’s general MO in life.

And he has his head in the skies: often donning an “Occupy Mars” T-shirt, he glibly reports, “I’d like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” He also says, speaking more broadly about his underlying motivation, “I’m longing to think about the future and not be sad.”

Musk is a necessary shakedown and takedown, focusing on another at least potentially sinister force and real-life metaphor, joining the disreputable likes of Abu Ghraib and Enron. This one does come lined with more creative and graphic license, beyond the usual toolbox of documentary making. Gibney includes some intentionally retro computer graphics of different eras, reflecting the long trajectory of Musk’s tech trajectory, going backwards from Grok to X (formerly Twitter), to SpaceX, Tesla, PayPal, and his post-college project Zip2. We also get direct commentary from the subject himself threaded throughout the film, but in a CG package, with his own actual words morphed into an AI Musk talking head, subject to playful manipulations, especially at the end. That element amounts to a touch of AI Play-Doh play, fitting under the circumstances.

Admittedly, the animation layers can be a distraction from the truths of the subject matter, sometimes seeming too cheesy for their own good, but it adds to the general atmosphere of the filmmaker’s concept. Musk is like an epic cine-essay, pursuing a pressing question for the filmmaker and so many of us: just who is this guy desperate to control our planet and the cosmic beyond? And what does his power say about the state of humanity at this strange juncture in time? 

Some levity is required amidst the gravity at hand. Think of the finale of Doctor Strangelove, with Slim Pickens grabbing the reins of a nuclear missile like a wild horse, ecstatically “yee-hawing” on the path to oblivion. 

Boom! Oops, there goes another one.