Elon Musk Is in the Business of Selling Dreams in Trailer for New Doc

Filmmaker Alex Gibney has shared the first trailer for Musk, a two-part, four-hour deep dive into Elon Musk that Rolling Stone called “a nonfiction horror movie” following its film festival debut earlier this month.

“Elon Musk is one of the most controversial figures in the world. So I decided to make him the subject of my next film,” Gibney says in voiceover in the trailer. “But it soon became clear: Elon would not participate.”

It’s obvious why the Tesla and SpaceX boss was reluctant to participate: The two-minute trailer quickly touches on many of Musk’s controversies, from false promises about colonizing Mars and overstating his founding status at Tesla to going “Dark MAGA” and fathering children with scores of different women dubbed “the Breeders.” (The trailer also offers up a preview at the new (Oscars-eligible) song David Byrne wrote specifically for the documentary.)

“Musk now views unlimited power as his natural possession. Musk‘s power comes from the cumulative way that it gathers so much of what we already know about Musk and how he’s warped modern society, and presents it less as isolated incidents, scams, frauds, bad-faith arguments, and god complexes than the portrait of a sociopath behind the wheel,” David Fear wrote in his Rolling Stone review of the documentary.

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“Gibney said in a press conference that he doesn’t believe the story is over and the game is lost. Yet it’s hard not to walk out of his magnum opus and not feel a deep sense of despair. We may not know exactly how we got here, but we’re here.”

Musk, “an incisive look behind the legend of Elon Musk, the wealthiest, and most unchecked, man on the planet,” production company Bleecker Street said in a synopsis, arrives in theaters in October.