Elon Musk has unleashed a furious, hours-long broadside against filmmaker Alex Gibney after the director’s four-hour documentary about the tech billionaire premiered at the Venice Film Festival — branding Gibney a bitter has-been with no credibility left.
Gibney, the Oscar-winning director behind exposés on Enron’s collapse, WikiLeaks, and Vladimir Putin, unveiled his sprawling portrait of Musk to a warm reception in Venice, despite its nearly four-hour runtime.
In the film, Gibney did not hold back, characterizing the world’s richest man as genuinely “dangerous to the world around him’.
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That framing ‘dangerous’ didn’t sit well with Musk, who spent hours venting on X. He dismissed the documentary as a hit piece that fails to land its punches, and mocked its length, joking that four hours of unflattering commentary made for an exhausting watch.
He didn’t stop at critiquing the film itself — he went after Gibney personally, calling him a bitter old man who lost the plot long ago and insisting the director has zero integrity left to speak of. At another point, Musk suggested even something unpleasant deserved more respect than the filmmaker.
Musk’s response escalated beyond simple criticism. He reposted an image implying Gibney is a puppet controlled by billionaire George Soros and the Democratic Party, who in turn is depicted as pulling strings in Hollywood — endorsing the image with a single word of approval. When a supporter mentioned never having heard of Gibney before the film, Musk suggested the entire project was a coordinated psychological operation designed to shape public opinion against him.
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Podcaster Katie Miller — wife of senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller and a former communications director at Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — amplified the criticism, pointing out what she saw as a notable absence of Musk’s friends and associates from the film’s lineup of interviewees, a complaint Musk boosted to his followers.
The dispute has since escalated beyond social media sparring. Musk’s attorney has reportedly sent a legal letter to Gibney’s production company, taking issue with the documentary’s suggestion that Musk used his Starlink satellite network to influence the outcome of the 2024 U.S. election in Donald Trump’s favor — a claim Musk’s camp insists is false and one they say Gibney chose not to properly investigate before airing it.