The rise of the world's richest man: What the Musk documentary says

Alex Gibney's documentary about tech titan Elon Musk opens with the question: "How did Musk gain so much power, and why do we give it to him?"

The Oscar-winning director, whose films include Enron and Scientology, spends nearly four hours answering that question in "Musk," tracing the rise of the Tesla chairman and CEO from his childhood in South Africa to the SpaceX initial public offering in June that made Musk the world's first trillionaire. (The film, now in theaters, has a 10-minute intermission.)

In 2023, after news broke that Gibney was filming the documentary, Musk preemptively called it a "smear campaign" on Twitter (now known as X). The film interviews Musk's ex-wife and former colleagues, intersperses the video materials he has left in the public eye over the past 30 years, and also uses his past voice files to create an artificial intelligence version of Musk, allowing this virtual character to comment on the content of the film. The film chronicles Musk's rise from a Silicon Valley start-up to his brief tenure as the de facto head of the Department of Government Effectiveness.

Here are a few key takeaways from the film.

Musk’s affluent childhood was shadowed by violence

"Musk" depicts Elon's childhood in apartheid South Africa, revealing a chilling past. In an interview, his father, wealthy businessman Errol Musk, claimed that he had shot and killed three intruders, causing blood to flow all over the floor and form a "swimming pool" on the floor of their home. In another interview, he described Elon sitting in a car next to the body of a family friend who had just died "suddenly." Elon's mother, Meyer Musk, accused her husband of physical and emotional abuse when she separated from Errol (her ex-husband denied the accusations), but Elon still chose to live with his father. At one point, Elon was bullied so severely at school that he was hospitalized for a week. According to his later recollection, his father stood with those who bullied him.

He has repeatedly profited from failure

Gibney believes that Elon Musk’s business mistakes have made him as rich as his successes. He tried to become CEO of his first startup, Zip2, but failed and was kicked out of the company, but received $22 million in acquisition proceeds. Just a few years later, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel kicked Musk out of PayPal, and Musk walked away with $250 million.

Gibney said that a more recent example is that Twitter (now X) lost 80% of its value after Musk's acquisition (however, estimates from different institutions are inconsistent). Musk then merged X and his AI startup xAI into SpaceX, completing the largest IPO on record, prompting Gibney to ask: "How can you screw up over and over again and still make tons of money?"

The business deception behind Tesla

Although Musk claims to be the founder of Tesla, the car company was actually founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning. However, in a legal settlement reached in 2009, Musk negotiated a co-founder title for himself. Later, he claimed that Tesla owners could easily replace car batteries weighing up to 450 kilograms, which helped him obtain more than $100 million worth of environmental credits from the state of California, even though he only built one battery-swapping station in the desert.

Gibney also spent considerable time discussing Tesla's Autopilot system, which has been linked to multiple accidents that have resulted in casualties. In 2016, Musk led the production of a promotional video showing Tesla's self-driving cars, which boosted the company's stock price. However, it was later revealed that the car was actually controlled by a human at certain points during filming, and that the car was involved in a crash.

He considers increasing the birth rate a "national emergency"

"Musk" conducted lengthy interviews with Elon's first wife, Justin Musk, and former conservative internet celebrity Ashley St. Clair. St. Clair was in a relationship with Elon from 2023 to 2025, and bore him one child (Musk is known to have 14 children in total). St. Clair said she received private messages on social media from multiple women who said Musk had offered to get them pregnant. She uses a particularly vivid metaphor in the documentary: "He was sowing seeds in private messages, almost like a Gatling gun spraying sperm."