The New Elon Musk Documentary Just Dropped a Trailer That Doesn’t Pick a Side

Documentary filmmakers spend years chasing subjects worthy of a definitive character study, and few figures loom larger over the current cultural moment than Elon Musk. Between rockets, electric cars, social media chaos, and a brief but consequential turn in Washington politics, his story practically writes itself as prestige nonfiction material.

That’s exactly the territory Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney has been circling for years, following a filmography built on dissecting complicated, powerful figures and institutions. Gibney previously tackled Scientology, Enron, and the Catholic Church, so a subject as polarizing as Musk feels like a natural next chapter in that body of work.

Now, ahead of its high-profile festival debut, the first teaser for Gibney’s upcoming documentary “Musk” has finally arrived, and it wastes no time setting up the film’s central tension. The 48-second clip layers a cascade of contradictory voices over footage of spacecraft launches, letting the audience hear wildly different characterizations of the billionaire stack up against one another.

The teaser opens on an almost worshipful note, with voices calling Musk “possibly the greatest living inventor,” comparing him to “the real-life Iron Man,” and praising him as “one of the greatest builders of all time.” From there, the tone shifts sharply, with the same barrage of commentary soon labeling him “chaotic, random, capricious, manifestly cruel and selfish” before flatly declaring, “He’s a fascist.”

The trailer closes on an especially stark visual, showing a spacecraft crashing to the ground and erupting into flames as a voice concludes, “Elon is a nuke.” It’s a striking final image for a teaser clearly designed to reflect just how divided public perception of Musk has become.

Gibney’s film, simply titled ‘Musk’, will world premiere out of competition at the Venice International Film Festival before continuing on to the Toronto International Film Festival. Clocking in at nearly four hours, the documentary is one of the more ambitious nonfiction projects tackling a living public figure in recent memory.

The film also features an original song from Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, titled “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” adding another layer of cultural weight to a project already generating significant buzz on the festival circuit. Bleecker Street has also boarded the film for a theatrical release in the United States.

Musk’s own history with the project has been anything but quiet. Gibney first confirmed work on the documentary back in 2023, and Musk quickly predicted on social media that it would amount to nothing more than a “hit piece,” a claim Gibney publicly pushed back on at the time.

That tension between subject and filmmaker only adds another layer of intrigue to a project that seems determined to resist easy categorization. Rather than positioning itself as a straightforward takedown or a celebratory profile, the teaser suggests Gibney is more interested in capturing the full, messy spectrum of how the world currently sees Musk.

Given the scale of Musk’s influence across technology, business, and now politics, that kind of sprawling, contradiction-embracing approach may be the only honest way to tell his story. Whether audiences walk away seeing an inventor, a cautionary tale, or something in between will likely depend entirely on what they bring into the theater with them.

With festival premieres now just days away, ‘Musk’ is poised to become one of the most talked-about documentaries of the year regardless of where viewers ultimately land on its subject.

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