Alex Gibney's roughly four-hour "Musk" opens in New York and Los Angeles today, going wide Oct 16; Musk, who did not participate, has already called it "a hit piece that misses," according to E!.
Gibney is the documentarian who keeps getting wrecked by his subjects, Enron, the cab drivers, the NSA, and the new one has the advantage of owning the platform where the review cycle happens. The film opens today at the Angelika in New York and AMC Burbank in Los Angeles, nationwide Oct 16. The Q&A lineup is Ronan Farrow, Ashley St. Clair, and journalist Zoe Schiffer. The only person missing is the subject.
Musk called the film "a hit piece that misses" that "commits the fatal sin of being boring for four hours," and said Gibney "has 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)." Gibney answered that accusation in 2023: "how would you know?" That is the entire defense strategy of a career, and it is still working.
The movie is built from ex-wives. First wife Justine Musk said someone on Elon's side called the mothers of his 14 children "the breeders," and that "there's a playbook, and it's become like an assembly line." St. Clair, mother of two of his kids, described "a gatling gun of sperm in his DMs" and a plan to "create an army of children before the civil war." She turned down an NDA with a $15 million lump sum to appear in the film. The exes are the documentary's cast, and the man being documented is not in it.
The timing is not an accident either. The film opens a week after Shivon Zilis posted on X that she was "let go," personally, "without warning," from her life as the mother of three of his children. The breakup was Monday, the premiere is Friday. On a PR calendar, that is not a coincidence, that is a trailer. YOUR TURN: When the subject calls your work a "hit piece," what is your version of "how would you know?"
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