{ "archive_path": "archive/1788875115.63822", "base_url": "www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/musk-review-elon-musk-documentary-alex-gibney-hbo-1236693254", "basename": "", "bookmarked_date": "2026-09-08 13:45", "canonical": { "archive_org_path": "https://web.archive.org/web/www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/musk-review-elon-musk-documentary-alex-gibney-hbo-1236693254", "dom_path": "output.html", "favicon_path": "favicon.ico", "git_path": "git/", "google_favicon_path": "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.hollywoodreporter.com", "headers_path": "headers.json", "htmltotext_path": "htmltotext.txt", "index_path": "index.html", "media_path": "media/", "mercury_path": "mercury/content.html", "pdf_path": "output.pdf", "readability_path": "readability/content.html", "screenshot_path": "screenshot.png", "singlefile_path": "singlefile.html", "warc_path": "warc/", "wget_path": "www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/musk-review-elon-musk-documentary-alex-gibney-hbo-1236693254/index.html" }, "domain": "www.hollywoodreporter.com", "extension": "", "hash": "1J68AX8RGE3RKCJQ1MCP", "history": { "archive_org": [], "dom": [], "favicon": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--output", "favicon.ico", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.hollywoodreporter.com" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-11T16:39:20.574181+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "favicon.ico", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788875115.63822", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-11T16:39:19.929717+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "git": [], "headers": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--head", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/musk-review-elon-musk-documentary-alex-gibney-hbo-1236693254/" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-11T16:39:21.513904+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "headers.json", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788875115.63822", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-11T16:39:20.582037+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "htmltotext": [], "media": [], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/@postlight/parser/cli.js", "https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/musk-review-elon-musk-documentary-alex-gibney-hbo-1236693254/" ], "cmd_version": "1.0.0", "end_ts": "2026-09-11T16:39:39.692778+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788875115.63822", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-11T16:39:36.059531+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/readability-extractor/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmp52u06_5r", "https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/musk-review-elon-musk-documentary-alex-gibney-hbo-1236693254/" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-09-11T16:39:36.045994+00:00", "index_texts": [ "Not long after news first emerged three years ago that Alex Gibney had begun work on an in-depth study of Elon Musk, the uber-tech bro went on the defensive on his social media platform, Twitter. Sorry, I mean X. \u201cIt\u2019s a hit piece,\u201d he cried, before switching to the totally mature \u201cGibney is a douche.\u201d It must have been no surprise to the filmmaker that his subject would decline to make himself available for\u00a0Musk, a whopping documentary think piece running close to four hours, which traces in dense detail the dizzying ascent to stratospheric wealth and influence of the man who dreams of colonizing Mars.\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\tGibney\u2019s solution to that key absence turns out to be a stroke of creative genius. After having his team pull together a data base with every statement Musk had ever made and every interview he had ever given, the director\u2019s digital effects crew set about developing a CG avatar to address the camera as if in a sit-down chat from a gaming chair, sticking strictly to the billionaire business mogul\u2019s own words.\n\n\n\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tMusk\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\n\tA provocative combo of indignation and alarm.\n\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\tVenue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition)Release date: Friday, Oct. 16Director: Alex GibneyScreenwriters: Alex Gibney, Michael J. Palmer\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t3 hours 45 minutes\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tWhat could be more appropriate for a subject who has hypothesized that we could all be living in a computer-generated base reality, a simulation controlled by some future power, as if all of humanity might be player characters in a video game? Gibney digs into the extent to which Musk\u2019s ambitions were shaped early on by vintage sci-fi movies and books, though many have pointed out that he seemed to miss the anti-capitalist satire of one of his key inspirations, Douglas Adams\u2019\u00a0The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy, instead treating it like a manual for technological advancement at any cost. \n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tThis is the man who wants to ensure the survival of human civilization while our own planet teeters toward the abyss? If you buy that, Gibney seems to suggest, he has a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The filmmaker has likened his perspective in this project to that of Dorothy\u2019s dog Toto in\u00a0The Wizard of Oz, alert to the shuffling feet beneath the curtain rather than being bamboozled by the shyster title character\u2019s techno showmanship.\n\n\n\n\n\tWith a clarity that makes his conclusions hard to refute and a wealth of visual material, spiffy graphics and insightful interviews to keep it interesting throughout the epic run time, Gibney pulls back the curtain, charting the path of the South African whiz kid, who grew up under apartheid and has never denounced the racially discriminatory regime.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\tThe film hopscotches from Musk\u2019s first U.S. software company, Zip2 \u2014 the sale of which netted him $22 million despite the enterprise never having turned an operational profit \u2014 through the key business ventures that helped consolidate his power and multiply his net worth.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\tThose steppingstones include the purchase of Twitter, which soon cratered in value but became a crucial bullhorn to legitimize his partly illusory personal narrative for a devoted cult, sweeping the stated goal of promoting free speech under the rug. This was a logical extension of what Musk\u2019s first wife, Justine Wilson, considers his strategic gaslighting skills, allowing him to shape exactly the image he sought to project, not of an investor but of a visionary inventor. That\u2019s why it was so important to Musk to be credited as the founder of Tesla, which would come as news to engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tGibney paints Musk as an unabashed megalomaniac. He ventures outside the professional sphere to touch on the \u201clegions of children,\u201d as someone describes them; the disposable \u201cbreeders\u201d; the drug use; and the father who seems like a nightmarish piece of work. But the gossipy tidbits almost pale next to the eye-opening shadiness of some of the business strategies.\n\n\n\n\n\tThe Tesla chapter is compelling less for the success of launching electric vehicles on the market than the more inconvenient factors that somehow went ignored \u2014 from falsehoods about the time required to swap out a battery pack to the playing down of fatalities that resulted from glitches in self-driving cars, reported to have caused at least 65 deaths.\n\n\n\n\n\tAround the same time, Musk mastered the art of stock manipulation, as well as securing government handouts and energy credits. He\u2019s now inextricably linked with Republican Party politics and more specifically Donald Trump. But the film notes that although foundational funding for Musk\u2019s SpaceX rocket program came from the George W. Bush administration, along with a $1.6 billion contract that reportedly rescued the division from looming bankruptcy, it was the Obama administration that honored and expanded on the initiative through NASA. In retrospect, that now looks like an uncharacteristically laissez-faire decision.\n\n\n\n\n\tGibney lays out the shift by which Musk turned away from the Democrats to align himself for personal gain with Trump, in what many believe was a case of him buying the 2024 election, funneling close to $300 million into the campaign.\u00a0\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tThat opened the door to the infamous DOGE purge. Musk unleashed a team of 19-to-22-year-old Silicon Valley bros to kneecap government agencies of which they had zero understanding. But crucially, they did understand those agencies\u2019 IT systems, giving them access to classified programs and Americans\u2019 personal information. Some of the tech reporters interviewed maintain that all that data has been used to link pension funds and 401ks to SpaceX, creating a precarious balance.\n\n\n\n\n\tWhile the formation of DOGE, during which Musk bounced around the Oval Office like a kid in a candy store, was positioned as a cost-cutting measure and an assault on fraud and waste, by decimating the IRS, the department substantially increased the federal deficit. DOGE\u2019s primary achievement now appears to have been hobbling government agencies to block all investigations of Musk\u2019s companies.\n\n\n\n\n\tWhile the entire section of Gibney\u2019s film on DOGE has the sobering effect of a corruption expos\u00e9 and the fear factor of a \u201870s conspiracy thriller, the cruelest part of it all is the dismantling of USAID, the independent government department for international development founded by JFK in 1961. It\u2019s estimated that 14 million lives in developing countries will be lost because of DOGE cuts, 4.5 million of them kids under 5.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\t\u201cUSAID is a criminal organization,\u201d Musk says at one point. \u201cTime for it to die.\u201d His stunt with \u201cthe chainsaw for bureaucracy\u201d now looks like the most juvenile theatrics, especially given that hundreds of federal workers had to be rehired when their departments stopped functioning, in some cases receiving back-pay for the interim months.\u00a0\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tOne of the most sinister examples of cause and effect in this culling is the immediate suspension, after Trump signed the executive order, of medical and nutritional aid for children. An emotional former USAID employee recounts how 500 pounds of food destined for starving children was already on the ground but could not be distributed because of the government veto, meaning it was allowed to pass its expiration date and then be destroyed.\n\n\n\n\n\tMusk himself provides the key to comprehending how people in power could be so heartless when he calls empathy \u201ca bug in Western civilization.\u201d His rants about the \u201cwoke-mind virus\u201d are both disturbing and tiresome, and his flair for self-dramatizing outrage is illustrated by comments about his trans daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson. \u201cMy son Xavier is dead,\u201d Musk famously said, using his now-estranged offspring\u2019s birth name. \u201cKilled by the woke-mind virus.\u201d\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\tPerhaps the loudest alarm set off by Gibney\u2019s movie is the section devoted to Musk\u2019s complete turnaround on AI. After initially coming out as a skeptic, he pivoted to full-steam-ahead with minimal regulation once he established his xAI offshoot \u2014 which quickly landed a contract with Pete Hegseth\u2019s ignominiously renamed \u201cDepartment of War.\u201d Then there\u2019s his chatbot Grok, which malfunctioned and self-generated an anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi rebrand dubbed \u201cMechaHitler,\u201d not to mention generating nude images of real women and girls.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\tOf course, Musk\u2019s distance from the project \u2014 which Bleecker Street will release Oct. 16 with a 10-minute intermission, ahead of its HBO premiere some time next year, provided Larry Ellison doesn\u2019t run interference and have it shelved \u2014 means there\u2019s no rebuttal here. But most people who sign up for the doc will have long ago made up their minds about Musk, so a one-sided argument won\u2019t be a problem.\u00a0\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tGibney\u2019s films can occasionally seem more like the assembly work of his diligent research team, but he\u2019s passionately engaged and fired up here, plugged into\u00a0Michael J. Palmer\u2019s punchy editing\u00a0and some choice needle drops woven in among Daniel Pemberton\u2019s textured score, with lots of churning synths. The end credits feature a thematically appropriate original David Byrne song, \u201cLet Me Sell You a Dream,\u201d co-written with Pemberton.\n\n\n\n\n\tIt\u2019s legitimate to wonder how healthy it is for anyone to sit in simmering outrage for 225 minutes, but I simply could not look away.\u00a0Musk\u00a0may not tell us a lot that\u2019s not already out there to some degree, but it collates a ton of information in a very persuasive package that will leave many audiences chilled to the bone. To put it crudely, my first thought on exiting the screening room was, \u201cWe\u2019re fucked.\u201d" ], "output": "readability", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788875115.63822", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-11T16:39:33.546103+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/musk-review-elon-musk-documentary-alex-gibney-hbo-1236693254/" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-11T16:39:33.538053+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "'Musk' Review: Alex Gibney Doc Digs Deep on World's Richest Man", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788875115.63822", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-11T16:39:33.458882+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "wget": [ { "cmd": [ "wget", "--no-verbose", "--adjust-extension", "--convert-links", "--force-directories", "--backup-converted", "--span-hosts", "--no-parent", "-e", "robots=off", "--timeout=120", "--restrict-file-names=windows", "--warc-file=/data/archive/1788875115.63822/warc/1789144761", "--page-requisites", "--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) wget/GNU Wget 1.21.3", "--compression=auto", "https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/musk-review-elon-musk-documentary-alex-gibney-hbo-1236693254/" ], "cmd_version": "GNU Wget 1.21.3", "end_ts": "2026-09-11T16:39:33.445776+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/musk-review-elon-musk-documentary-alex-gibney-hbo-1236693254/index.html", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788875115.63822", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-11T16:39:21.523395+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ] }, "icons": null, "is_archived": true, "is_static": false, "latest": { "archive_org": null, "dom": null, "favicon": "favicon.ico", "git": null, "media": null, "pdf": null, "screenshot": null, "singlefile": null, "title": "'Musk' Review: Alex Gibney Doc Digs Deep on World's Richest Man", "warc": null, "wget": "www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/musk-review-elon-musk-documentary-alex-gibney-hbo-1236693254/index.html" }, "link_dir": "/data/archive/1788875115.63822", "newest_archive_date": "2026-09-11T16:39:36.059531+00:00", "num_failures": 0, "num_outputs": 6, "oldest_archive_date": "2026-09-11T16:39:19.929717+00:00", "path": "/movies/movie-reviews/musk-review-elon-musk-documentary-alex-gibney-hbo-1236693254/", "schema": "Link", "scheme": "https", "snapshot_id": "7a3f3006-86c4-4ea7-a0f8-209addada82c", "sources": [ "/data/sources/1788875115-import.txt" ], "tags": ",pool,drudge,war-wiki", "tags_str": "pool,drudge,war-wiki", "timestamp": "1788875115.63822", "title": "'Musk' Review: Alex Gibney Doc Digs Deep on World's Richest Man", "updated": "2026-09-11T16:39:19.929504+00:00", "updated_date": "2026-09-11 16:39", "url": "https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/musk-review-elon-musk-documentary-alex-gibney-hbo-1236693254/" }