Forty-eight seconds of trailer. Nearly four hours of documentary. Bleecker Street has released the first teaser for Musk, Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney’s long-in-the-making examination of Elon Musk, and the brief preview makes its critical intentions pretty clear. But there’s far more to this one than the teaser lets on, with Gibney having spent years digging into Musk’s personal life, businesses, political influence and extraordinary accumulation of power. Watch the teaser above and get the essential details on Musk below.
The Teaser Builds Up the Musk Myth, Then Pulls It Apart
The teaser starts with the familiar version of the Musk story. A SpaceX rocket climbs towards the sky while voices call him “the real-life Iron Man,” “possibly the greatest living inventor” and “the greatest capitalist in history.”
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The praise doesn’t last. As the spacecraft begins to falter, the descriptions become decidedly less flattering: “chaotic, random, capricious,” “manifestly cruel and selfish,” and, from another voice, someone who would not be the hero if he appeared in a science-fiction novel. It ends with a spacecraft crashing into flames and one final assessment: “Elon is a nuke.”
The teaser itself reveals relatively little about the actual contents of the film. What it does establish is Gibney’s approach: put the enormous mythology surrounding Musk on the table, then interrogate it.
That puts Musk firmly in the wheelhouse of a filmmaker who has spent much of his career examining powerful people and institutions. Gibney won the Academy Award for Taxi to the Dark Side, and his credits also include Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Elizabeth Holmes documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.
Musk Started at Two Hours, Then Became a Monster
The extraordinary runtime makes considerably more sense when you look at how dramatically the story changed while Gibney was making it.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Gibney began investigating Musk in late 2022. By late 2024, he believed he had essentially completed a two-hour HBO documentary covering Musk’s childhood and the rise of companies including Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink and Twitter/X.
Then the scope widened considerably. Musk became increasingly involved in the 2024 US presidential election, went on to work with Donald Trump’s administration through the Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, and continued expanding his already considerable influence across technology, government and communications. HBO backed additional filming, Gibney kept shooting, and the project eventually reached a mammoth six-hour cut before being trimmed.
The theatrical version runs 225 minutes, or three hours and 45 minutes, with the Venice Film Festival listing confirming a 10-minute intermission. That brings the complete cinema presentation to 235 minutes. The version scheduled to debut on HBO in 2027 will be slightly longer again, running a full four hours.
Gibney’s thinking about the project also evolved. He has said he initially hesitated to make a film about Musk at all and became interested when a friend suggested the real subject was not simply the businessman himself, but “21st century power.”
Musk Refused an Interview, So Gibney Went Around Him
Musk does not sit down with Gibney in the film. Speaking to the Associated Press, the director said he began the project with a degree of admiration for Musk and genuinely wanted to interview him, but Musk declined.
Finding other willing participants wasn’t necessarily easy either.
“People were terribly afraid to speak to me on the record, or at least on camera,” Gibney said. “These were people in his companies. These were people who knew him well. These were supporters and critics.”
Despite that reluctance, the final film includes an extensive collection of voices connected to or familiar with Musk, including his first wife Justine Musk, his father Errol Musk, Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, journalist Kara Swisher, Wired reporter Zoë Schiffer, neuroscientist and author Sam Harris and Nobel Prize-winning AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton.
One of the most prominent participants is Ashley St. Clair, who shares a child with Musk.
Ashley St. Clair Says She Turned Down a $40 Million NDA
St. Clair’s involvement has become one of the major talking points surrounding the documentary. At Venice, she said she rejected a non-disclosure agreement that was intended to guarantee paternity support.
As The Independent reported, St. Clair explained at the press conference why she ultimately agreed to participate in Gibney’s film: “I was offered the opportunity not to speak for $40 million. When you’re offered something like that, it causes a debate in your head about what your speech means and how valuable that is. Why do they want to offer me this amount of money not to speak?”
She continued: “And I believe Alex spoke to it a little bit, about Elon’s unreality. He does have complicated relationships generally, but his most complicated relationship is with the truth. And so, I think most importantly, I want to set the example for my kids that you should never take being materially comfortable over speaking the truth.”
St. Clair says she rejected the arrangement and ultimately appears in Gibney’s film. The Associated Press has also reported on St. Clair’s account and her participation in the documentary.
The Film Isn’t Just About Musk’s Personal Life
For all the attention likely to be generated by St. Clair and other personal revelations, Gibney appears to have considerably bigger ambitions.
The documentary traces Musk from his childhood in South Africa through his early technology ventures, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink and his takeover of Twitter, while repeatedly examining how those ventures translated into wealth and influence.
It also looks closely at Musk’s relationship with government. Reporting from Venice, The Guardian says the documentary examines government support for Tesla and SpaceX, Musk’s role in Starlink and its significance in global conflicts, and his access to federal systems during his time with DOGE.
Gibney’s larger question becomes increasingly clear as the film progresses: how did one unelected businessman accumulate this much influence across transportation, communications, satellites, artificial intelligence and government?
That takes the documentary into some of its most politically charged territory. Gibney and several interviewees raise concerns about the access DOGE employees had to government data and what could theoretically be done with that information. These remain allegations and concerns raised within the film; The Hollywood Reporter says Musk’s companies did not respond to its requests for comment on the documentary.
There is a Video-Game Version of Elon Musk
Musk’s refusal to participate directly also pushed Gibney towards one of the documentary’s stranger creative choices.
The filmmakers collected existing recordings of Musk speaking publicly and used his actual words to create a digital AI avatar of Musk. The avatar appears throughout the documentary, including sequences designed like a first-person shooter, complete with health bars, lives and respawns.
There is more behind the device than simply having some fun at Musk’s expense. Gibney told The Hollywood Reporter that his research repeatedly encountered Musk’s fascination with simulation theory and the idea that reality itself may resemble a game. The filmmakers therefore use video-game language to play with questions of image, mythology and the different versions of reality Musk presents.
AP reports that Gibney’s team also sought legal advice before deploying the digital Musk. It’s an unusual choice for an investigative documentary and one that could prove divisive given the wider debate around synthetic likenesses and AI-generated imagery, but it should at least give Musk a visual identity beyond talking heads and archive footage.
The First Reviews Suggest Gibney Really Has Gone Deep
Critics have now started emerging from the other end of those 225 minutes, and the initial Venice response has been strong, albeit with some reservations about the film’s length, access and how much genuinely new material it uncovers.
TheWrap calls the film “punishing” and says its central concern is not merely Musk’s personality, but how he acquired so much power and why society allowed him to do so.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney similarly delivers a strongly positive assessment of the mammoth documentary, describing a dense portrait of Musk’s rise to wealth and influence.
IndieWire takes a slightly more measured view, calling the film a damning and exhaustively researched portrait while arguing that its power comes less from major new revelations than from assembling the Musk story into one unsettling whole.
The Telegraph also finds plenty to admire in Gibney’s sprawling attack, including a runtime it considers largely justified, while noting that such an enormous documentary can still feel surprisingly incomplete in places.
The Guardian, meanwhile, highlights the cumulative impact of Gibney’s exhaustive approach to a story whose individual pieces will already be familiar to many viewers.
Rather than relying on one earth-shattering revelation, that wider view may prove to be Musk‘s real selling point. Much of its subject’s life has already unfolded very publicly through books, relentless news coverage, interviews, podcasts, lawsuits, political appearances and an almost uninterrupted stream of posts from the man himself. Gibney appears interested in what changes when years of scattered stories are gathered into one sustained examination.
Importantly, the film reportedly doesn’t simply dismiss Musk’s accomplishments. Critics note that Gibney acknowledges the significance of ventures such as Tesla and SpaceX and his subject’s genuine appetite for ambitious engineering projects, even as the documentary challenges the mythology built around him.
David Byrne Wrote a Musk Song Using Musk’s Own Words
There is another unusual addition waiting near the end. Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and composer Daniel Pemberton wrote an original song for the documentary titled “Let Me Sell You a Dream”, with Byrne building the lyrics from Musk’s own public statements.
“No editorialising. Straight from the man’s mouth to mine,” Byrne told Variety.
The song plays during the film and is being submitted for Best Original Song consideration at the 2027 Academy Awards. Byrne already has an Oscar, having shared the Best Original Score prize for The Last Emperor with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su in 1988. It would also give Byrne his first Oscar nomination since that 1988 victory.
Musk Already Calls the Documentary a “Hit Piece”
Unsurprisingly, Musk is not enthusiastic about the project. He labelled it a “hit piece” back in March 2023, years before its completion.
It’s a hit piece
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 7, 2023
Gibney’s response was simple: “How would you know?”
Musk has since renewed his criticism. In a more recent post on X, he again called the documentary a “hit piece”, criticised Gibney and questioned its four-hour length, asking whether the filmmaker was trying to “bore people to death”.
The exchange neatly sums up the distance between filmmaker and subject. Musk chose not to participate, while Gibney continued interviewing people around him and extending the project as Musk’s public role evolved.
When Can You Watch Musk?
After premiering out of competition at the Venice Film Festival on September 8, Musk will continue to the Toronto International Film Festival.
Bleecker Street will release the documentary in select US cinemas on October 16, 2026, before expanding nationwide on October 23. The 225-minute theatrical film will be presented with a 10-minute intermission, while HBO will premiere its expanded four-hour version in 2027.
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