ELON MUSK’S ENEMIES MAKE HIS BEST CASE:
In 2023, Alex Gibney, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker, announced that he was working on a documentary about Elon Musk. He asked Musk for an interview. The answer was delivered on X: “Gibney,” Musk informed his 241.5 million followers, “is a douche.”
You could take the world’s richest man at his word. Or you could spend three hours and 55 minutes watching Gibney do his best to prove Musk right.
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The real America, the one we know from discernible and observable facts, is nowhere on display. In Gibneystan, no record exists of Musk the champion environmentalist, hailed by the left until he refused to continue and parrot its platitudes. Nor is there any mention of Big Tech’s frequent and egregious collusion with Democrat-controlled administrations; the sin of seeking proximity to political power is unique to the devilish Musk himself.
And Gibneystan might’ve been an amusing place to visit for a few hours if it weren’t for the fact that its denizens wish to impose their strange worldview on the rest of us. As each of Gibney’s interviewees makes clear, theirs is an America in which we oughtn’t to be proud, oughtn’t to work hard, oughtn’t to attempt audacious things. Walking out of Musk, one suspects that had Gibney turned his attention to the moon landing instead, he would’ve given us a portrait of Neil Armstrong as a privileged cisgender white male tragically colonizing the moon.*
None of this, however, is to say that Musk isn’t an effective or an entertaining film. See it, and it’s very likely that even if you entered the theater skeptical about its subject’s achievements, you’ll leave it with a strong, inexplicable desire to dash down to your local Tesla dealer or Starlink retailer and spend some cash to support Elon Musk.
That’s because whatever else he may be, Alex Gibney is a proficient filmmaker, and the choice he gives us in his latest epic is simple: We can live in a world governed by mutually accrediting mediocrities who obfuscate to enforce their strange and zealous ideological beliefs on the rest of us, or we can live in a world where ambitious, curious, and patriotic Americans dream big and go for broke. For most of us, the choice is easy.
* Don’t worry, Hollywood has already made that movie: First Man: One Giant Flop for Moviekind.