Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’ Premieres in North America as Director Calls For People to “Stand Up and Resist”

A polite but outraged crowd greeted Alex Gibney’s epic four-hour Elon Musk documentary at the Toronto Film Festival Monday night, marking the film’s arrival in North America and offering a glimpse into how the investigative grenade might land in theaters when it’s released in October.

“I found it very overwhelming. And that’s a compliment,” one of the people in the audience said.

That filmgoer would know — she was Katie Drummond, global editorial director of Wired and a key voice in the film, who was seeing it for the first time. “What stands out to me is how all encompassing [Musk’s] reach and power really are,” she said from the stage, standing next to Gibney.

As documented in a Hollywood Reporter cover story two weeks ago, Musk is a four-hour dive into the growing economic and social influence of its polarizing title mogul, sweeping through his fiefdoms that range from AI to social media to automobiles to outer space and questioning both the credit given him and the lack of skepticism about the power he has accrued. One standout section focuses on the secrecy-clouded four-month DOGE period in Washington in which Musk and people who worked for him potentially collected intimate data on tens of millions of Americans, possibly even for later political use.

Gibney keyed on that aspect at the Toronto premiere. “Shadow president of the United States,” is how he referred to Musk at one point speaking from the stage, and added, “I think we’re recognizing that a few billionaires are trying to take control of the world and it’s up to us to stand up and resist.”

The audience applauded lustily after the movie ended, talking excitedly if nervously to each other as the lights came up and then shot hands in the air during a post-screening Q&A to ask about Musk’s power, filmmaking choices and, yes, potential resistance.

At least one Musk stan did turn up at the screening, asking Gibney “would you rather live in a world without the accomplishments of Elon Musk” — a line Gibney parried back with “I kind of question the phrase the accomplishments of Elon Musk.” He added, “Tesla was not founded by Elon Musk; he was not the key inventor. SpaceX also was founded by a lot of powerful engineers.”

The product of more than three years of shooting and editing (including a fresh round when its title subject ended up in Washington in 2024), Musk marks a career capstone for Gibney, who has taken on everything from Scientology to Enron to the U.S. military in past forays. The documentary arrives in North America after a blowout screening at the Venice Film Festival a week ago, where filmgoers openly thanked Gibney at the screening for the journalistic and democratic service he provided. The TIFF premiere also followed a conversation at TIFF on Sunday in which the director laid out the case for the film and said he got “nothing back” when he reached out to the mogul’s legal team after a threat.

Musk is set to hit theaters in just a little a over three weeks. Distributor Bleecker Street moved the film up one week after A24 said it would drop its surprise Nathan Fielder-Lance Oppenheim documentary You Can See Everything on Oct. 16. Musk will now open New York and Los Angeles on Oct. 9 and then play in most major cities on the 16th, which will put the film up against the Elizabeth Holmes movie. A Barbenheimer situation — Molmes? Husk? — is possible, though filmgoers would need seven hours to spare.

The movie will then move to a pay VOD window for as many as four months before HBO airs the film in the first quarter of 2027 — providing no monkey wrenches are thrown in by incoming Warner Bros. Discover owner David Ellison.

A major awards push is also planned, with Musk a favorite to be nominated for best documentary and original song (a bouncily subversive David Byrne closing-credit number) and even could land a slot in best picture depending on how the narrative-film field shakes out. A doc has never been nommed for Oscar’s top prize, but both the Gibney and Fielder movies stand a better chance than any nonfiction film has in many years.

Gibney’s subject, at least, is less excited about such a prospect. In response to the film, Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro last week sent a letter to filmmakers saying “Because you have refused to screen the film, refused to fact-check it with us and refused the witnesses who came to you, we have every reason to expect that it contains further statements about Mr Musk that you know to be false, or whose falsity you have deliberately chosen not to investigate.” The letter also noted, “As you know, we have attempted to contact you multiple times and requested an opportunity to present the facts in the normal fact-checking process that is the hallmark of ethical journalism. You have refused to engage.”

Gibney fact-checked certain details with members of Musk’s team but has not offered to show him the movie, in keeping with a long tradition of journalists not making their work available to subjects before it is released.

Gibney’s film also surfaces a text Musk sent ex Ashley St. Clair after the 2024 election in which he said he would “unleash the anomaly in the matrix,” noting his “lasers in space,” which St. Clair believes was a reference to Starlink. “You are on notice, before release, that the insinuation is false,” Spiro’s letter said.

Musk kept quiet on X during and immediately after the TIFF premiere. In one of several posts on X last week, he posted, without being known to have seen the film, that it’s “a hit piece that misses, and makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours.” But no one in the audience Monday seemed to be bored, shaking their heads at key moments, clapping enthusiastically at the end and making their approval known when Gibney offered in the Q&A that he would “question the phrase the accomplishments of Elon Musk.”

After the talk, attendees mobbed Gibney to ask him everything from his reach-outs to Musk to how he chose which companies and eras of the mogul to focus on, the director spending nearly 20 minutes greeting the fans.