How 'Musk' director Alex Gibney became a critic

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gestures on stage at the Capital One Arena after President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th President of the United States in Washington, DC on Monday, January 20, 2025. Ken Cedeno/UPI/Alamy Live News hide caption

Some time ago, Alex Gibney got curious about how Elon Musk accumulated impossibly vast amounts of wealth and power.

So the Oscar-winning documentarian did what he does best, spending four years of deep research into Musk's world to create a film that's nearly as many hours long, each minute kept riveting by a trove of dreadful facts, videos, legal documents and interviews with people close to the tech entrepreneur.

"I started out as — if not an admirer — at least somebody who is sort of interested in what he was doing and liked it," Gibney told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep.

Gibney, who narrates the film, says he was a "proud" owner of a Tesla Powerwall energy storage system at his home and Tesla solar panels on his roof.

But Gibney's perspective shifted as he prepared his film, Musk , which opens in theaters Friday. It's due to stream on HBO in a few months.

"I became increasingly resentful and angry. When [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth basically said that they were now going to use xAI to be fully integrated into the Department of War, it was like an out-of-body experience," he said, referring to the artificial intelligence company founded by Musk that's behind the Grok AI assistant.

Alex Gibney spent four years making his nearly four-hour film Musk . Jigsaw Productions hide caption