The world’s richest man wasn’t in the building — nor would the troll king ever want to be, seemingly — but Alex Gibney‘s nearly four-hour documentary portrait, Musk, nonetheless brought the house down Tuesday at its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
The Oscar-winning director’s lengthy interrogation of Elon Musk and the growing power he wields received a five-minute standing ovation from the appreciative crowd, with a couple of people shouting “thank you,” inside the Sala Grande.
The film received a very positive reception but its nearly four-hour runtime and the deeply unsettling nature of Gibney’s portrayal also seemed to have exhausted the crowd.
Nearly four years in the making, Musk is less a straightforward biography than a relentless investigation into how its subject has accumulated such extraordinary influence over world affairs — from Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink to X and his co-pilot seat inside Donald Trump’s political movement. Gibney began the project in late 2022 and believed he had finished a roughly two-hour film in late 2024 — only to keep expanding it as Musk became increasingly enmeshed in global politics. The version screening in Venice runs 225 minutes, plus a 10-minute intermission. Gibney has described the film as an attempt to pull back the curtain on the hype and mythology surrounding Musk and instead examine what the director views as an increasingly troubling concentration of unchecked power combined with dangerous impulses.
Musk has been publicly attacking the project since it was announced. After Gibney’s intentions were revealed in 2023, Musk dismissed it on X as a “hit-piece,” prompting the director to reply, “How would you know?” Musk later called Gibney a “douche,” to which Gibney simply responded: “Douché.”
Gibney has built his career interrogating powerful personalities and institutions. He won the documentary feature Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, his investigation of U.S. military torture, after previously earning an Academy Award nomination for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. His subsequent targets have included Scientology in Going Clear, WikiLeaks in We Steal Secrets and Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos in The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.
Following Venice, Musk will continue its fall festival and awards season run at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Musk was produced by Gibney, Jessie Deeter and Erin Edeiken for Jigsaw Productions, with Zhang Xin’s Closer Media, Anonymous Content and Double Agent also producing. Black Bear is handling international sales. Bleecker Street will open the film in select U.S. theaters Oct. 16 before expanding nationwide Oct. 23.
Musk is screening in Venice out of competition, so it is not eligible for the Golden Lion. The documentary is one of the marquee titles in an especially strong nonfiction lineup at this year’s festival, which runs through Sept. 12.