A new documentary makes a ruthless claim about Elon Musk: he’s a fraud

Documentarian Alex Gibney worked on a film about the US CEO of Tesla for almost four years. He started the project ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, long before Musk became head of Doge, a body that promotes the efficiency of US governance. As Musk’s political power continued to increase, so did the length of the film.

Gibney has said that at first he hesitated to take on the project, but his friend convinced him that the documentary would be a significant depiction of the use of power in the 21st century.

Elon Musk has not himself agreed to give Gibney any interviews, despite his numerous attempts. Instead, Musk branded the documentary a smear campaign as soon as the project was first announced to the public.

Gibney says that he used to be an admirer of Musk, but with the documentary project, that admiration crumbled.

“When you start getting familiar with the facts and following them, they lead you in a certain direction. For me, they led to the fact that the myth of Elon Musk as a kind of modern Leonardo da Vinci fell apart,” Gibney tells the news agency AP:lle.

“I think the central message of the film is that Musk is not an inventor. He is a fraud.”

Gibney according to the founder of Spacex and the developer of launch vehicles, he has learned to create certain kinds of images of himself, in the language of the film “master shots”, which in turn have determined his public image.

According to Gibney, according to Musk’s favorite biographers and numerous social media followers, Musk is a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci who seems to have the answer to every question and is working diligently to save the planet and enable humanity to become a multiplanetary species.

”In Musk I decided to retell the familiar biographical story, but ignore the master himself. Instead, I examine it from different angles that show that the image of the master is an illusion and reveal a much more disturbing the truth,” says Gibney on the film festival website.

Oscar-winning Gibney is a well-known American documentary filmmaker. He won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2008 for his film Taxi to the Dark Side. He is also known for, among other things, Enron, Lance Armstrongistaof Scientology, Steve Jobsista and Theranos Elizabeth Holmesista about the critical documentaries he made.

Now premiering according to Gibney Musk is a story about power and its abuse.

Hundreds of people have been interviewed for the documentary, both officially and unofficially. Many of them were afraid to speak in front of the camera. To Gibney’s surprise, even those who admire Musk first wanted to make sure they had permission to be interviewed.

“I thought, wow, Musk seems really weak to be such a big and powerful person.”

Temporally the Russian-American extends his documentary even longer than Musk Julia Loktevto be performed in Venice My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile takes almost six hours. The documentary follows the flight of independent Russian journalists from Moscow with a few hours’ notice after Russia invaded Ukraine and shut down all independent media.

The film has been shot for four years and is a sequel to the film released in 2024 My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, where the journalists’ work was followed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The film festival is opened by a British director visiting Venice for the first time Danny Boylen movie Ink. It is about the rise of the British tabloid The Sun to become the world’s best-selling newspaper in a time before click headlines and social media.

Its premiere In Venice you can also By Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szorin documentary Amwhich focuses on the Gaza conflict. The film was shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv and is described as “revealing in detail the systems behind Israel’s premeditated massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”

The software also includes, among other things Florian Zellerin a psychological thriller Bunkerstarring a Spanish duo Penelope Cruz and Javier BardemKorean Lee Chang-dong a film dealing with the themes of work and freedom Possible Love mixed Robert Pattinson starred Primetimewhich tells about the popular program of the 21st century To Catch a Predator. It has been directed by Lance Oppenheim.