This Is the Scariest Revelation From Bombshell Elon Musk Documentary

Courtesy of TIFF Screening at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14 following its premiere last week in Venice, Musk has already earned the ire of its subject .

Given how severely it damns him, that’s hardly surprising.

Over the course of four exhaustive hours, Alex Gibney’s documentary casts him as an untrustworthy and “chaotic” force for evil.

He’s an unrestrained narcissist.

A callous con man.

An insecure tyrant.

And a profiteer who’s cannily leveraged—to the great financial benefit of his companies and himself—the fact that modern society imagines Silicon Valley CEOs as magicians with the power to transform the present and the future.

Yet of all the revelations in the prolific director’s latest, there may be none scarier than the implication by right-wing influencer Ashley St.

Clair (who’s the mother of one of his numerous children) that Elon Musk may have used his Starlink internet network to rig the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Oh, and that those 10,000-plus satellites are outfitted with space lasers—meaning that, if true, he’s a real-life Lex Luthor with the resources to remake the world in his mad image.

Musk does not boast the participation of Musk, who (as seen in introductory passages) has decried the documentarian as a “douche” and his non-fiction profile as a “hit piece.” Consequently, Gibney operates largely from the public record, using a CGI Musk and a comprehensive database of the man’s statements to guide his investigation.

With the aid of journalists and acquaintances, what he uncovers is, to a significant extent, familiar; at 235 minutes, it offers up plentiful material that informed viewers will have previously read about or seen.

Nonetheless, that doesn’t negate the power of this wide-ranging expose, which by its conclusion comes to feel like a horror film about a man with the potential to destroy us all.

Musk ’s Achilles heel is the sheer wealth of its video clips, sound bites, and anecdotes, all of which Gibney struggles to mold into a streamlined narrative.