“What are the odds that we’re in base reality?” Elon Musk asks rhetorically. “Like, we are in a simulation.”
So opens the new trailer for Musk, Alex Gibney’s trippy-but-deadly-serious documentary about the world’s richest and potentially most powerful man. Musk believes, or says he believes, that everything around us may be essentially a video game, so Gibney responds in kind, turning his unwilling subject into a digital avatar and then having him mouth words he actually said.
You don’t see that avatar in the trailer, but you see plenty else: Musk peddling phantom visions of Mars, Musk’s Tesla allegedly responsible for the death of an innocent person, the women Musk recruited to help him populate the planet by having his offspring, and a whistleblower revealing a potentially damning text he sent the night of the 2024 election. All of it is plays over David Byrne’s original “Let Me Sell You a Dream” tune, the 2 1/2 minutes boiling down nearly four hours of film time.
The film’s piece de resistance, as flicked at in the trailer, is Musk’s arrival in Washington D.C. and chaotic, destructive four-month stint as head of DOGE, which the film alleges resulted in tens of thousands of jobs and lives lost as USAID and other programs are cut and may have also allegedly resulted in a lot of data being pocketed by Musk and his team. The film also explores the messy overlap between Musk’s business interests and government oversight during that time. “The conflicts of interest are shocking,” Wired leader Katie Drummond says in the trailer.
Reviews cited throughout the trailer (critics weighed in after the Venice and Toronto film festival screenings) laud the doc’s ambition and impact. THR’s David Rooney, quoted in the piece, was similarly enthralled with what Gibney did, noting the film had “a clarity that makes his conclusions hard to refute.”
Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Going Clear) spent two years making a two-hour movie about Musk before the tycoon arrived in D.C., and then, when he became part of the Trump administration, another year making essentially a second two-hour movie about everything that happened inside the Beltway. (HBO, which owns TV and streaming rights in North America, called the Oscar winner in 2024 to say they wanted more and would fund it.)
Bleecker Street releases the film in the U.S. on October 9, first in New York and Los Angeles and, the next week, across the country. How it does will be a test of the viability of documentaries, the popularity of Musk and, maybe most important, the interest of the public to engage with and even protest an oligarchal takeover of American life.
After slamming it and having his lawyer put the filmmaking team “on notice,” Musk has been silent lately on the movie. Any further comments ahead of release could amount to marketing nearly as valuable as the trailer.
