Elon Musk Rages Over Alex Gibney’s ‘Hit Piece’ Documentary ‘Musk’: ‘Horrible Human’

The four-hour documentary premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, and while it's unclear whether Musk actually watched it, he walked away with strong feelings towards its director

Elon Musk is ranting on X in response to the upcoming documentary, Musk. “He has ZERO integrity,” he said. “Horrible human.” As it turns out, he’s not talking about the subject of the film (himself), but rather its creator, Alex Gibney.

The four-hour documentary premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, and while it’s unclear whether Musk has actually watched it, he walked away with some strong feelings towards its director. “Dogshit is worth more respect than Gibney,” Musk wrote on X, later adding, “Gibney has zero integrity. Zero. Fortunately, his movies are boring af.”

Musk’s bigger gripe seems to be with the sources Gibney assembled to help paint a portrait of Musk in the documentary. The film features appearances from Justine Musk, his first wife; Ashley St. Clair, who has a child with Musk; Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard; his father, Errol Musk; journalists Kara Swisher and Zoë Schiffer; and more. “Gibney just assembled a hit list of people who either have an axe to grind or don’t even know me (but still have an axe to grind),” Musk said.

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Musk arrives in theaters in the U.S. on Oct. 16 and HBO will air the documentary later this year. Gibney spent years chipping away at the film. In 2023, he told Rolling Stone, “There was a background thing for me going, ‘Should I do it?’ ‘Should I not do it?’ But more intensely for some months now. And that kind of thing is more exploratory — talking to people, that sort of stuff. I make a lot of films, and each one of them takes quite a bit of time. I’m noodling on Musk.”

At the time, Gibney said it was “too early to tell what the film is going to be.” But as Musk’s entanglement with the restructuring of Twitter in X evolved alongside his escapades with Donald Trump’s White House, the film began to shape itself. Still, Musk sees it as nothing more than “a hit piece that misses, and makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours.”