The Four-Hour Documentary Elon Musk Cannot Stop

Four Hours, One Man: Alex Gibney's Musk

On September 8, 2026, in the Sala Grande on the Lido, the lights went down and came back up nearly four hours later. The audience stood. Some shouted "Thank you." The applause carried exhaustion. Even people who admired the film had to admit that sitting in the dark while one person is dissected for nearly four hours leaves your legs numb and your mind full.

The film is called Musk. Its director is Alex Gibney, an Oscar winner who previously took apart corporate fraud in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, religious manipulation in Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, and the Theranos scandal in The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. This time, he turns his camera on Elon Musk.

From fan to accuser

Gibney did not start out as Musk's enemy. When he began the project in late 2022, he told the Los Angeles Times that he was "to some degree a fan of the billionaire." The original plan was a portrait of "economic power in the 21st century." But the deeper he researched, the wider the gap grew. The distance between the public narrative and the archival record eventually pushed the film from a portrait of economic power into an investigation of political influence.

The timeline has its own force. Gibney completed a roughly two-hour version by late 2024. Then Musk became more deeply entangled in global politics, and HBO pushed him to expand. The final version runs 225 minutes, including a 10-minute intermission. In Venice, Gibney said that even that was "not long enough" to tell the whole story.

A CGI avatar in a gaming chair

Musk declined to be interviewed. Gibney's response became the film's most controversial and most discussed technique: using AI voice-sync technology to let a CGI avatar sitting in a gaming chair "say" things Musk himself had said publicly. The team built a database of Musk's public statements and interviews, then had the avatar repeat them verbatim.

Gibney explained the choice as both a satirical reply to Musk's own claim that we may live in a simulation and a way to convey "the contrast between the reality of what he does and the unreality of his narrative."

The film begins with Musk's childhood in South Africa. Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, X, the Trump campaign. Among the interviewees is Ashley St. Clair, the conservative influencer who had a child with Musk. In the film, she describes being asked to sign a confidentiality agreement in exchange for child support: "I was offered $40 million to keep quiet." St. Clair has also sued Musk's AI company, saying its Grok chatbot allowed users to generate sexualized deepfakes of her.

The Hollywood Reporter called the film "a lethal portrait of a tech mogul as a con man," a con man given so much power that he cannot be stopped, "an infuriating and alarming provocation." Owen Gleiberman of Variety wrote: "Once you begin to assemble Musk's scandals, shortcuts, and slipshod management, you find a creator of mirages, someone who promises more than he delivers… a genuine, if flawed, technocratic fantasist, a messianic opportunist, and something of a madman." Deadline called it "the hit he deserves," portraying Musk as "petty, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, cruel."

At the Venice press conference before the premiere, Gibney said Musk poses an "extremely" dangerous threat to democracy. He repeatedly invoked a concept, "noble cause corruption": "Once you decide you are a force for good, you are entitled to bend the rules. Not a lot. Just a little, then a little more. And now, with the stock profits you gained through improper means, you can buy the presidency of the United States."

How a film became a political football

The content is a trial. The distribution process is another.

In North America, the independent distributor Bleecker Street acquired theatrical rights and scheduled an October 9 release. HBO bought North American television and streaming rights back in 2023 and planned to air it in the first quarter of 2027. It looked straightforward.

Internationally, it was far more complicated. Universal Pictures paid millions in 2023 for rights outside North America. But in mid-September 2026, The Hollywood Reporter published a story saying Universal was "getting cold feet," potentially abandoning international release and returning the rights to the producers. Universal was uneasy about the film's political sensitivity.

The backlash came quickly. The argument against Universal's hesitation was obvious: a documentary acclaimed in Venice and Toronto could fail to secure international distribution because its subject is "one of the most powerful people in the world." That logic seemed to confirm the film's argument: a billionaire's power is enough to make a major Hollywood studio hesitate.

Universal then held internal discussions and publicly said it "remains committed to releasing it in theaters internationally" and was "working on a release strategy." But as of the reporting, no specific international date had been set. Variety was more optimistic, saying Universal had "always been enthusiastic about an international release" and that the lack of a date was not unusual for a nearly four-hour documentary.

Several factors feed the uncertainty. Musk's lawyer, Alex Spiro, sent a "formal legal notice" to Gibney's production company, Jigsaw Productions, before the premiere, accusing the film of "defamation" and of being built on "predetermined conclusions." Jigsaw responded by citing the First Amendment and stressing that the right to scrutinize powerful figures is protected.

Another structural factor: HBO's parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, was at that point potentially being acquired by Paramount, whose owner is the Ellison family. Larry Ellison is briefly but negatively mentioned in the film. At the same time, Musk has close ties to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. If HBO were acquired by Paramount, the film's streaming release could face additional regulatory and political pressure.

Musk's counterattack

Musk's reaction to the film illustrates the pattern Gibney depicts on screen.

Since Venice, he has posted a series of aggressive replies on X. He called Gibney a "terrible person," a "bitter old man who has lost his way," with "zero integrity." He called the film "boring af." Earlier, when the project was first announced in 2023, he posted that it was "an attack piece" and called Gibney a "jerk."

In a letter dated September 3, 2026, Spiro demanded that the filmmakers "check the facts with people who know," or face "litigation." The letter cited text messages in the film involving Musk and Ashley St. Clair. On X, Musk denied the claims, saying St. Clair "has a history of false allegations."

Jigsaw Productions' response was concise and forceful: the producers noted that Musk, a self-described "free speech absolutist," should support the right of filmmakers to scrutinize powerful figures. It was a public test of the values Musk claims to hold.

The meaning of four hours

Almost no documentaries run four hours. On Reddit, comments were full of "four hours of torture" and "I need a break just from the poster." Viewers resist that runtime.

But to treat the length of Musk as merely a failure of editorial judgment is to misunderstand its nature. Gibney has suggested in several interviews that the film is so long because Musk's behavior spans many domains and scandals, and touches many dimensions of power. Any shorter version would inevitably leave out something essential. When HBO pushed Gibney to expand the film to include Musk's relationship with the Trump campaign, that decision itself acknowledged a fact: Musk's story is not a business story, or even a tech story, but a story about how power works in the 21st century.

The four-hour runtime is itself an argument. Tesla's self-driving promises, SpaceX's government contracts, Starlink's role in the Ukraine war, X's manipulation of public discourse, the $291 million poured into Trump's campaign. No single dimension is enough to explain the Musk phenomenon on its own. Only by putting them all together can the full picture emerge. In Venice, Gibney said: "There were so many events, so many trees. Sometimes it's useful to see the forest and stitch the narrative together."

That method of "stitching" is Gibney's signature. In Enron, he used carefully arranged archival material and interviews to turn a complex corporate fraud case into a tragedy of greed and hubris. In Going Clear, he wove together internal Scientology documents, former members' testimony, and dramatized reconstructions to build a detailed exposé of the organization's machinery. In Musk, that method is pushed to its limit.

The ending

Near the end of the film, David Byrne performs an original song, "Let Me Sell You a Dream." The lyrics are made entirely of Musk's own quotations: "no commentary, straight from his mouth to mine."

The choice distills the film's entire methodology: add no external judgment, simply place Musk's own words and actions side by side and let the contradictions speak for themselves.

Whether that method works depends on whether viewers are willing to invest nearly four hours. In an age of fragmented attention, that is a hard ask. But for Gibney, that is the point: if the crisis of democracy deserves to be taken seriously, then scrutiny of its key enablers deserves the same seriousness. Seriousness means time and detail.

Whether Musk ultimately secures wide international distribution, and whether Musk's legal threats have any effect, remain open questions. But one thing is already clear: the film's existence, and the distribution fight around it, have become a case study in how power works today.

In an era when a billionaire can buy a social media platform and fund a political movement, then threaten to sue critics, a documentary that tries to connect those facts is doing work few other films are doing.

Gibney says the film's purpose is to make viewers "take seriously the proposition that Musk is a threat to democracy." Whether viewers ultimately agree or not, the act of spending four hours with the film is itself a democratic practice. In an age of information overload, being willing to take the time to understand how power works is a basic and difficult political action.