Do Elon Musk’s many messes deserve a four-part documentary? If you understand the scope of the damage he’s done, the answer is yes. The devastating impact he’s had, from our cultural perception of politics to technology’s dysfunctions to the worsening American economy, is so extensive it can be exhausting. In this regard, Alex Gibney’s documentary is a lot to take in, but also one of the most important for highlighting how a man this flawed acquired such wealth and power.

Gibney couldn’t secure an interview with Elon Musk for this film, based on Musk’s social media interactions, which viewed the filmmaker as a crafter of hit pieces who should fuck off. But he does try to meet Elon to discuss his views on technology and the world. He does so in a few ways. Given how much Musk talks about simulacra, the film attempts to stage his many business endeavors more like a video game. To give Elon his own voice, Gibney also fed Musk’s public appearances into an AI to generate responses to certain lines of inquiry through a 3D-rendered interpretation. I would say it’s poor taste to feed into AI, but this seems like something Musk would’ve favored. He places far too much trust in AI to handle everything. As I write this, Musk just posted that he used his Grok AI to place an order for some LEGOs, a post that immediately backfired by revealing too much info, prompting X users to cancel his order.

This trend runs through Elon Musk’s career: he sells only dreams that don’t come true. He brands himself as an engineer and businessman, but a closer look shows he never really succeeds as either. Even his earliest attempts to capitalize on the dot-com bubble reveal someone who didn’t know what he was doing. His businesses weren’t highly profitable, and many programmers considered his coding a mess. But if you only saw Elon as the man who sold his first company for a massive sum, you’d think he was smart. In the many business endeavors that followed, Musk’s goal became clear: look smart while never being smart, hoping nobody notices the faulty components or spaghetti code.

Several interviews with experts in business, coding, engineering, and journalism reveal how badly Musk crafts his ambitions. Former business partners reveal Elon’s scummy tactics: forcing more competent people out of the room to ensure he had total control. His attempts to buy rockets from Russia for his space company are deeply concerning, especially when his negotiations blow up in his face almost as badly as his many failed rocket launches. One of my favorite Elon blunders mentioned in this movie was when he took over Twitter and demanded the code be printed so he could read it. Any developer can tell you this is one of the most idiotic things to do, as it is a huge security risk with no benefit over viewing code on your computer. You don’t know whether code works unless you implement it and see whether the connections work. Only the devout and deeply ignorant followers of a cult believe Elon is so smart he can fully understand functioning code printed on paper.

The cult of Elon isn’t hard to spot when you consider the ideas he is pitching. Electric cars and living on Mars sound like exciting promises of a brighter future, ripped from the pages of speculative science fiction. Of course, under Musk’s leadership, these dreams quickly fall apart when you stop coasting on dreams and start looking at the science. While occupying Mars is far too ambitious for someone as mediocre as Musk, electric cars seem the most doable. But the flimsy design of his cars, the battery scam, and the self-driving feature, which has caused accidents and even death, make those dreams fade. These errors are quickly covered up with settled lawsuits and distracting promotional materials. Add to that the many television interviews and cameos where Musk is praised as the genius of our era, and it’s not hard to see why so many fell for the fool claiming to be a tech-bro god.

Gibney’s film doesn’t start with Elon’s upbringing, but it doesn’t shy away from the personal events that shaped him. Interviews with Elon’s father paint a portrait of a fearful kid in South Africa who always felt he had to be ready for war, although Elon’s description of his childhood seems to run counter to his dad’s. Perhaps exaggeration and lies are just family traits. The desire to be ready for attack seemed to motivate his desire for relationships; he seemed more concerned with having children than with ever loving somebody. His ex-wife, Justine, notes that Elon’s ego dominated their marriage until the bitter end. She stressed that she was his wife and not an employee, only for Musk to remark that if she were an employee, he would fire her. The relationships that followed were not much better, as Musk’s plans to make a “legion” of children quickly progressed into affairs of sperm donation. He cares little for the damage he’s done, preferring to block his ex-wives from messaging him and control custody of the kids. To Musk, children are the future, but seen more as assets for his own ambitions, given how quickly he dismissed his transgender offspring as dead for switching gender.

The film is edited less like a list of Elon’s atrocities and more like an examination of what shaped these cruel decisions. To understand Musk’s gamer mindset, the film portrays his soaring stock price as a racing game and the Twitter layoffs as a shooter. These gaming sequences are astute in how they’re staged, aiming to look like an exaggerated capitalist simulator Musk would play. It probably looks like fun to him, but it becomes horrifying when the layoff shooter game reaches the government level, eroding services that cost lives. It would be a convenient excuse for Musk to say he’s so rich he can afford to mess everything up and face no accountability. However, his pivot into meddling in government highlights how this is more about protection than anything else. Before the 2024 election, multiple investigations targeted Elon’s businesses. The only way to make them go away was to cozy up to Donald Trump, ensure he won the presidency, and have him wipe them out. As Elon remarked in an interview with Tucker Carlson during that year, if Trump didn’t win, “I’m fucked.”

At the heart of all this is a lack of empathy. Musk doesn’t care about saving the world or taking us to the stars. Empathy, to him, is regarded as toxic, and he warns of those who would embrace such a philosophy. All that matters is his ego, where whatever benefits him takes precedence. This can even work against him, as in footage from a Babylon Bee podcast, a conservative comedy collective, where the hosts urged Elon Musk to accept Jesus Christ. Although Musk boasted about being an atheist, he realizes that only the Christian conservatives are willing to back him now. He capitulates with a reluctant mumble about Jesus being fine. This man is in a deep hole, and he’s determined to drag us all down with him with flammable technology and tampering with the government.

I could go on and on like this because Elon’s hideous personality and contributions to our current American nightmare are so extensive that it’s exhausting to recount it all. Alex Gibney’s documentary is important in this regard, not only for keeping receipts, but also for explaining how such a figure was granted a cartoonish level of control he shouldn’t have. The film becomes all the more engaging when Gibney highlights the corrupt nature and devious ambitions of an engineer who builds false dreams rather than real products. It’s no shock that Musk has an obnoxious ego, but when Gibney lays out how Musk’s manufactured reputation affects the women he dates and the failed businesses he starts, he paints a clearer picture of Musk’s worst hits. Elon wants to sell dreams of the future to distract from the problems of the present, and it’s deeply disturbing how many keep drinking his placebo potion and giving this idiot bigger checks. Even when Gibney uses Elon’s own Grok AI system to ask questions about the future of Musk-proposed tech, the results are damning. The magic of Musk is weakening for even the most gullible, and it remains to be seen if his market-manipulating appeal will die out before the rest of us succumb to his grotesque destruction.