We Got a Sneak Peek at the Massive Musk Doc

Elon Musk is so insane that he must be a genius, we’ve been told. But is that true? Is he actually just … insane? A new film peels back the layers of his illusions.

Who is Elon Musk? That is the question Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour documentary tries to find the answer to.

In interviews with Musk’s past romantic partners, business partners, and former friends, Gibney peels back the layers of Musk’s curious quest for omnipotence. Musk declined to sit for an interview, so Gibney created an AI version of Musk—drawing from a trove of interviews and public posts to create realistic versions of what Musk might have responded.

At the start of the film, we are taken through a video game simulation of Musk’s ventures, from SpaceX and Tesla to X and DOGE. As we are whisked through time, the AI version of Musk toggles through different “roles” to assume on his video game console: “provocateur,” “techno king,” “Kublai Khan,” “seer.”

I thought this was clever, because it’s not only the premise that Musk sees the world as a video game simulation—it’s the reality that this man is a chaotic shape-shifter with no central core. Musk sits within whatever identity will help him “win” in the moment—or whatever will entertain his dopamine-hungry brain after he has won.

There is a tremendous amount to parse through in this documentary, so I thought I’d break down some of the most important takeaways about Musk’s companies, personal relationships, and his character and motivations. (I’d also encourage you to see it in theaters, just dress like you’re about to go on a short flight!) Here we go…

First, Elon Musk Is Not That Smart

The beginning of the documentary takes us through the origins of Musk’s first companies. It turns out that Musk was pushed out at both of them for incompetence.

At Zip2, a digitized sort of Yellow Pages that Musk’s father provided him seed money for, Musk had written such tangled lines of code that a group of more seasoned executives had to bring in actual programmers to untangle them all. At X, which became PayPal, Musk’s co-founder Peter Thiel appealed to the board to oust Musk, which they did. But because of his equity stakes in both, however, Musk made out with hundreds of millions of dollars at the end, especially after PayPal sold to eBay. All of that led to his investment in Martin Eberhard’s Tesla, and initial funds for SpaceX.

Musk’s first wife, Justine Wilson, describes Musk as possessing a “fearlessness” when they were young; that he saw failure as “death,” and that “death was not an option.” Musk’s own father says in the documentary not to bet against Elon, that you’ll always lose.

But his past failures beg the question: had Elon Musk not received seed money for his first business, or had he not been bailed out by other founders or board members of his first two companies—would he have been endowed with confidence and the funds to pursue his other later ventures?

To me, all of this points to an aggrieved person who learned how to rig a game because he was too afraid of ego death. Musk is not the Einstein-like genius that his followers believe him to be.

Musk Was Facing Criminal Charges Because of Tesla’s “Full-Self Driving” Feature

Tesla became the launchpad for much of Musk’s wealth, and so I’m glad the documentary spent a good chunk of time unraveling it.

Much of the lore that pumped Tesla’s stock was an embellishment, sometimes even a lie. Musk, initially an investor in Tesla, rigged the board with his brother and friend, allowing him to push out Tesla founder Martin Eberhard. Later on, Musk—a darling of the Obama administration, at the time—leveraged embellishments about Tesla’s battery swaps to get Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) credits, unlocking hundreds of millions of dollars of government contracts.

Then, Musk desperately wanted people to believe Tesla could drive on auto-pilot. But to keep costs down, Musk refused to use LIDAR for his self-driving function, relying on less reliable camera footage instead. In one marketing video that displays a Tesla driving autonomously, we come to learn that an engineer was actually in the trunk of the car furiously coding when the car should stop or go.

It gets darker: Musk once shared the story of Joshua Brown, a self-driving Tesla proponent; he posted a video of his Tesla autonomously stopping before catastrophe. Brown was later decapitated after his Tesla mistakenly identified a white truck as the sky. In another self-driving-related crash, Tesla denied having data of the car failing to notice a parked car and pedestrian—when it did.

Ultimately, Musk was facing a mountain of civil lawsuits and one criminal autopilot fraud case that could have actually landed him in jail had Donald Trump not been elected.

In many ways, it was surprising that Musk didn’t publicly support Trump sooner. When the Biden administration didn’t invite Musk to an electric vehicle summit—distancing themselves from his anti-union behavior—this seemed to catalyze Musk’s turn towards Trump. He felt totally rebuffed, and spoke frequently about how offended he was that he wasn’t invited. Soon after, he told one of the mothers of his children featured in the documentary that while he couldn’t be president, he could help elect the person who would be: Trump.

The Mothers Of Musk’s Children Know A Lot

One of the best testimonies in the film came from Ashley St. Clair, a former conservative influencer who Musk messaged over X because of her support of free speech—and with whom Musk eventually had a child with.

St. Clair reported turning down a $40 million non-disclosure agreement from Musk in order to tell her side of the story, and to teach her kids that material comfort should never come before doing the right thing. She says that Musk’s free speech advocacy, however, is “performative.”

Musk sees the women in his life as “breeders,” says his first ex-wife, Wilson. Musk frequently asked his children whether they wanted to be “winners or losers,” and whispered to Wilson on their wedding day that he would be the “alpha” in the relationship. Musk cut out his transgender daughter Vivian when she transitioned, and although he once told Wilson to tell Vivian he loves her, he cancelled Vivian’s health insurance the next day.

St. Clair says his personality flipped in such a manner as well, but after she had their kid. She recalls a time before that when Musk was falling asleep next to her. He was listening to a podcast about Kublai Khan, a relative of Genghis Khan who also sought to inseminate as many women as he could. Meanwhile, Musk, according to St. Clair, took X—Musk’s son with the musician Grimes—away from Grimes because he was Musk’s “favorite.” When Grimes begged to see her son, Musk blocked her.

On Election Night in 2024, both St. Clair and Musk were at the watch party at Mar-A-Lago. But Musk left early. When St. Clair messaged Musk excitedly that they were going to win, Musk responded that he had known this a few hours ago, that he had real-time data. He wrote that he had “10,000 lasers in space” feeding him information; that he was going to “unleash an anomaly in the matrix.” St. Clair responded that she would inquire more, but that she did not want to be deposed; the assumption was that Musk’s Starlink was giving him election data ahead of time.

He has a lot of our data, but so much of Musk’s behavior is rooted in a childishness, which may actually be the motivations for many of his decisions. Tech journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher refers to Elon’s alliance with Trump as a “daddy” complex of sorts—that Musk was seeking a kind of fatherly adoration from Trump that he never received from his own father, who Musk alleges abused him.

Occupying Mars Is Probably Not Achievable, But SpaceX Was Necessary To Uphold Musk’s Net Worth

In a few parts of the documentary, former Deputy NASA Administrator Lori Garver is interviewed about Musk. Initially excited about the private sector’s involvement in innovating—and SpaceX’s ability to orbit successfully after four tries, a feat only previously accomplished by countries’ space departments—Garver changes her tune later in the documentary when it comes to Musk’s claims about colonizing Mars.

Because while Musk’s story about making us an interplanetary species sounds tantalizing and “optimistic,” Mars is not inhabitable; there is no gravity or water and it is rife with radiation. We have not properly looked into how people can have sex or give birth on Mars, nor have we decided what the laws on Mars would be. It is a total dream, a fantasy.

But SpaceX was still an asset for rocket play. And after Musk acquired Twitter, turned it into X, and snubbed all his advertisers, he was facing mounting losses. So Musk—despite previously saying that AI was so dangerous it might “summon the demon” —decided to create xAI and its chatbot Grok. As Grok spewed out content praising Hitler and undressing little girls on command, Musk was leveraging the AI boom to raise money, eventually folding X and xAI into SpaceX, taking it all public, and minting himself a trillionaire for a brief period of time.

Musk Claims To Love Humanity, But Sees Humanity As Dispensable

Elon Musk claims to care about humanity in terms of “perpetuating the species.” But between the hundreds of thousands of government jobs lost and the millions of starving people without aid as a result of Musk, the documentary really enunciates Musk’s failure in creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

DOGE, manned by boys, made a lot of mistakes: they misunderstood Social Security systems, they listed $8 billion in savings when it was only $8 million in savings, and they even incinerated 500 tons of food going to starving children. To top it all off, the federal deficit actually increased.

The staff seems made in Musk’s image. In one deposition, a DOGE boy says he didn’t care at all about people’s lives because all he cared about was the federal deficit; in the same deposition he concedes that they did not reduce the federal deficit. In one video recording, Musk—the alleged genius—can be seen sneering with some top venture capitalists about how the government is simply “unfixable.”

That said, Tesla Takedown—a campaign to stop driving Teslas during the worst of DOGE’s impunity—was successful, according to the documentary, in large part because it bruised Musk’s ego so much. He is desperate to be liked and loved by a critical mass of people.

Sam Harris, a podcaster and Musk’s former friend, reiterates this, speaking of the pandemic as a time when he really started to see Musk’s lack of care for humans or reality, fueled by his obsession for validation on Twitter. At one time, Harris refers to Musk’s “psychopathology” and “dysregulation” to describe the inner workings of his mind.

In Conclusion…

I do wish the film helped us understand a bit more how Musk growing up in apartheid South Africa may have influenced his views on race. We see white supremacy erupt on X after he takes over, and there’s a video of his Nazi salute in the film. But perhaps for legal reasons—Musk and his attack dog-lawyer Alex Spiro have already threatened to sue and stop distribution of the film—I have to imagine there was so much they had to cut out (and I’m not sure the documentary could be any longer…!)

I suppose the one thing we do know, coming out of all of this, is that Elon Musk wants to “win.” But to what end? We now have a person with national governments beholden to his connectivity system, Starlink, and to his social network, X. His net worth is supported in part by fiction, yet his shareholders still grant him $800 billion pay packages. He makes decisions based on flattery, and it’s very unlikely we live on Mars, which is the story he’s trying to rally us around.

Do we want to give one single human being such power? If we somehow do, then who is that person? Who is Elon Musk?

His ex-partner Ashley St. Clair may have the closest answer: “Elon is a nuke.”