‘Musk’ Doc Teaser: Alex Gibney’s 4-Hour Elon Musk Exposé

If you had “Elon Musk gets a four-hour documentary” on your entertainment bingo card, congratulations — the first teaser for Musk just landed, and it arrives with a smirk and a knife. The clip opens with a voice practically swooning that Musk is “the greatest capitalist in history!” Then, without mercy, it cuts to the other side: “He’s chaotic, random, capricious,” says one observer. “He is manifestly cruel and selfish,” adds another. And then the kicker: “In a science fiction novel, he would not be a hero.”

Directed by Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Taxi to the Dark Side, Musk world-premieres today at the Venice Film Festival, and it is not a flattering portrait of the SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink and X owner. It is also very long — just under four hours — which, from the man who turned Enron’s collapse into a thriller, sounds exactly right. Here is everything you need to know before the internet picks a side.

What the ‘Musk’ teaser actually shows

The roughly 48-second teaser opens on a montage of spacecraft, launch pads and the machinery of Musk’s empire, while voices pile on the praise. One admirer roars that Musk is “the greatest capitalist in history.” Another frames him as the “greatest living inventor.” Then the tone flips on a dime. Observers describe him as “chaotic, random, capricious,” “manifestly cruel and selfish,” with one final kiss-off: “In a science fiction novel, he would not be a hero.” Variety’s write-up put the question even more bluntly: is Musk a visionary genius or a fascist who has “lost his mind”?

It is a brilliantly edited 48 seconds: hero worship and demolition, back to back, with no narrator to tell you which one to believe. That, in a nutshell, is Gibney’s approach — he lets the subject’s own orbit supply the ammunition.

Trailer: IGN Movie Trailers (YouTube)

Alex Gibney: the documentary heavyweight taking on Musk

If you are going to spend four hours inside the life of the world’s most famous billionaire, you want a filmmaker who will not blink. Gibney is exactly that. He made corporate malfeasance genuinely gripping in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, took a wrecking ball to Scientology in Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, and dissected the myth-making around another tech titan in Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. Add Zero Days, The Inventor and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, and you have a filmography that reads like a greatest-hits collection of modern power and its abuses.

There is a delicious bit of symmetry in the funding, too. Gibney’s production company, Jigsaw Productions, received its own billionaire backer in 2025, when philanthropist Wendy Schmidt took a controlling interest. The man documenting the century’s most scrutinized billionaire is himself backed by one. Nobody at the premiere is likely to let that irony go unmentioned.

A four-year investigation into a trillionaire

Gibney has been on this story for four years, and the result is a “definitive and unvarnished examination” of Musk’s rise — from PayPal and Tesla to SpaceX, Starlink and the chaotic X takeover. The cut that premieres in Venice runs roughly 235 minutes, according to TheWrap, just shy of the four-hour mark. TMDB’s own entry carries the tagline “The definitive story of the world’s richest man,” and the timing could not be better: SpaceX’s IPO made Musk the world’s first known trillionaire, as CBS News and PBS reported, even if a cooling stock rally has already started nibbling at the crown.

The film’s political stakes are just as high. Gibney has said his goal is to open audiences’ eyes and prompt the right questions about Musk’s influence, power and behavior during his period of peak political involvement — the era that saw him advising the federal government and overseeing deep cuts to federal jobs and international aid programs. The teaser has already lit up social media, with accounts sharing claims that the film digs far deeper into that chapter than the public record suggests.

The David Byrne song: Musk’s own words, set to music

Here is the detail everyone is talking about: the film ends with an original song by Talking Heads legend David Byrne, titled “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” and the lyrics are built entirely from Musk’s own public statements. “All his own words. No editorializing. Straight from the man’s mouth to mine,” Byrne told Variety, describing the result as sardonic poetry drawn from some of Musk’s wildest quotes. The track is already being positioned for the best original song Oscar race — a savvy awards play for a documentary expected to be a major Academy contender.

Musk vs. Gibney is already a fight

The two men have history, and it is not friendly. They have tangled publicly on X, with Musk branding Gibney a “douche” — to which the director retorted, “Douché.” That exchange tells you everything about the tone of this documentary. Gibney is not out to make hagiography; he has spent a decade chronicling institutions that lie to us, and he treats Musk’s empire with the same skeptical eye he brought to Enron and Scientology. For anyone who has followed the Elon Musk Show era of Musk coverage, this is the definitive, maxed-out version.

From Venice to HBO: how and when to watch

Here is the release roadmap, and it is a busy one. Musk world-premieres out of competition at the Venice Film Festival today, September 8. From there it travels to the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14. Bleecker Street brings it to theaters on October 16. And after the theatrical run, HBO debuts the film on premium cable and the HBO Max streaming platform — so for most viewers, the four-hour commitment will be a movie night at home rather than a trip to the cinema.

Beyond ‘Musk’: the billionaire-on-screen boom

Musk himself has become a recurring character in modern entertainment. The X takeover era was chronicled in Twitter: Breaking the Bird, and his space ambitions have their own dedicated portrait in MARS: Inside SpaceX. On the scripted side, A24 and Darren Aronofsky are still developing a Musk biopic adapted from Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography, with no actor attached yet, while Ike Barinholtz is set to play him in the OpenAI drama Artificial. Four hours of Gibney might feel like a lot — but it is hardly the only Musk content heading your way.

Should you clear four hours for it?

Honestly? If you have any interest in how power works in the 2020s, yes. Gibney’s documentaries are rarely a chore; Enron made accounting scandals feel like a heist movie, and Going Clear turned a church audit into essential viewing. Musk is a bigger, messier subject — part inventor, part showman, part political lightning rod — and the trailer promises a portrait that refuses to pick a lane. Whether you arrive as a fan, a critic, or just morbidly curious, the film’s real question is the one Gibney keeps repeating: what do we actually think about the man, now that we have seen how much power he holds? The teaser is the appetizer. The feast arrives in October.

Sources: Deadline, Variety, TheWrap, CBS News, PBS