‘Elon is a nuke.” The speaker is Ashley St Clair, a former conservative Maga influencer and one of Elon Musk’s former girlfriends-slash-baby mommas
She is a fascinating expert witness in Alex Gibney’s four-hour epic study of the world’s richest and dullest man: the overgrown brattish South-African-born trillionaire plutocrat, ersatz visionary and Trump courtier who owns Tesla cars, SpaceX rocket ships, Starlink satellites on which nation states’ military capabilities are increasingly reliant, X (formerly Twitter) which shapes the collective “incel” id of billions and GrokAI whose vast server farms daily guzzle oceans of precious water.
As head of Trump’s incompetent cost-cutting Doge (Department of Government Efficiency) unit, Musk actually increased the US deficit by sacking thousands of revenue officers whose job was to rake in tax – while reportedly accessing and improperly sharing Americans’ sensitive social security data.
He does indeed look like a nuke, efficiently designed, destructive, seemingly unguided and uncontrolled.
Gibney’s excellent film covers a lot of ground in its extraordinary story, although we don’t get to hear about the mysterious process that changed a balding youngster into a follicularly unchallenged mature man.
Musk is a uniquely disquieting baseball-capped figure, grinning and giggling and smirking on a thousand sycophantic podcasts like a modern, hyper-evolved version of Anthony Trollope’s wealthy charlatan Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now. But given Musk’s boyish love of space travel and sci-fi, Gibney wittily compares him to the hero of the 1936 film version of HG Wells’s The Man Who Could Work Miracles about godlike space aliens who capriciously confer supernatural powers on a banal, ordinary earthling.
Gibney doesn’t get to talk to Musk (or Trump) though in the spirit of Musk’s AI interests, he creates a photorealistic CG avatar who mouths all the things the man himself is reported as saying (a rather contrived visual joke, actually, which the film didn’t need). He speaks to many professional colleagues, and to Musk’s formidably opinionated father Errol Musk who fills us in on Elon’s formative years in the tense world of South Africa in which young Musk was bullied and beaten up.
Gibney speaks to Musk’s first wife Justine Musk (née Wilson), a passionate and intelligent woman who tells us about the tragedy of one of their infant children dying of Sids and then the hurt she felt when Elon felt the need to grandstand about this on social media, claiming the child had died in his arms (it was her arms, she says). And given that heart-wrenching death, how crass it was for him to announce later on social media that his trans daughter had “died” of “woke mind virus”. Much later, Musk showed a creepy enthusiasm for procreating many children with various women; Musk reportedly built compounds for his extended families like something from The Handmaid’s Tale.
Back in the 90s as a pushy, bright young tech innovator, Musk had started out by inventing and selling an online Yellow Pages-type site, got involved in Peter Thiel’s PayPal and cleaned up again when this was sold to eBay. He got involved in the electric automobile industry, giving us Teslas, while misleading the public about their range.
His SpaceX adventure and his preposterous and ignorant effusions about colonising Mars were spectacular advertisements for his personal brand – so important for inflating stock market valuation – especially when he did indeed invent rockets that could be landed and re-used. But the question of how and when these rockets will carry us to inhabitable planets remains unanswered. Both his cars and his rocket ships got him on the receiving end of millions of dollars of federal money and lines of credit.
And at the beginning of the 21st century he was still the darling of the liberal world and the Obama administration for an apparently compelling eco-vision for non-fossil-fuel cars.
All this changed when Joe Biden seemed to be casting a cold eye on Musk’s businesses, and Musk went all in on promoting Trump 2.0. In 2024 and was rewarded with that grotesque Doge sinecure, damaging American public finances – from which he had benefited so lavishly.
What is so absorbing about Gibney’s documentary is that it has the structure and rhetoric of a film that could be about, say, Elizabeth Holmes, disgraced inventor of the phoney blood-test, or Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency fraudster, or Billy McFarland, promoter of the Fyre festival. All of these were media darlings in their day, supposed visionaries and feted disrupters, talking the talk in front of saucer-eyed believers.
Unlike these illusionists Musk does have actual palpable success, with Tesla being a long-standing profitable company and Space X, among other things inventing successful re-usable rockets, allied with a skill they don’t have in moving on from commodity to commodity, while controlling the means of production in social media and cultivating the presidency. Just as well because, if Musk were ever to fall, it would truly send shock waves through Wall Street, Washington and Silicon Valley.
