By the time Alex Gibney and I sat down at the Ausonia Hungaria in Venice, he had spent the better part of the past four years trying to make sense of Elon Musk . The result is Musk, a nearly four-hour documentary that attempts to reckon with the extraordinary—and increasingly political—power accumulated by the Tesla and SpaceX tech billionaire.
“In some ways it’s a bleak moment now,” Gibney says while sipping a cappuccino. “We’ve allowed these people to gain so much power. And they did it in broad daylight while we were all watching.”
Now it’s just a few hours before the incredibly comprehensive, painstakingly researched film premieres at Venice’s 83rd film festival. Gibney, 72—the Oscar-winning documentarian who brought us 2015’s Going Clear, which went deep into the world of Scientology, and 2019’s The Inventor, about Elizabeth Holmes—has a reputation for piercing critiques of his subjects, and Musk pulls no punches in its attempt to depict SpaceX founder as the fraud Gibney believes him to be.
Musk himself declined to participate, despite Gibney’s efforts to interview him, and has dismissed the film as a “hit piece.” Instead, Gibney builds his portrait from interviews with his first ex-wife, novelist Justine Musk, with whom he has five children, and ex-lover Ashley St. Clair , mother to one of Musk’s children.
At the Venice press conference for Musk, St. Clair revealed that she had turned down a $40 million NDA from Musk after giving birth to their child last year, which enabled her to appear in Gibney’s film.
(Gibney says he also reached out to Grimes , electronic musician and mother of three of Musk’s children, but she declined to participate).
“Particularly with Justine and Ashley, if you look at patterns in someone’s life, one of the interesting things about Elon is that unlike some tech billionaires, he didn’t surround himself with airheaded pretty girls or pretty boys. He found women who were really pretty dynamic…he wasn’t attracted to bimbos,” says Gibney.
He singles out St. Clair, a former MAGA influencer Musk met on his website X, as “fascinating because she’s super smart and super funny.” But despite their dynamism, the film shows that Musk eventually tires of them. “All these women were entranced and enchanted with Elon early on. As soon as they have children, they’re not interesting except as…,” Gibney stops to quote Justine Musk’s own terminology from his film: “breeders.”
Gibney’s film gives the women more humanity and dimension than Musk himself seems to have. St.
Clair details her world colliding with Musk’s as a mutual experience: At the time they met, she had been a conservative influencer, and her connections to that world were relationships that Musk would later leverage. In one of the most explosive moments of the film, St.
Clair suggests that Musk interfered with the 2024 election, recalling that he left the Mar-a-Lago celebration early and later told her he knew it would go in Trump’s favor. She says that Musk had a “degree of certainty” about the results before they came in that “I had never seen before.” And told him she didn’t want to know more because she didn’t want to be “deposed,” to which, according to St.
Clair, Musk replied that she was wise.