Elon Musk Documentary Teaser Asks If Billionaire Is the ‘Greatest Living Inventor’ or a ‘Fascist’ Who ‘Has Lost His Mind’

The first teaser trailer for Alex Gibney’s highly anticipated Elon Musk documentary “Musk” has been released.

The film will world premiere out of competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on Sept. 8 before continuing to the Toronto International Film Festival.

In the 48-second teaser, montages of spacecrafts and astronautical devices fill the screen while voices giving varied commentary about Musk play in the background. The snippet does not give away much about the plot, but illustrates Musk’s polarizing character. 

“He’s possibly the greatest living inventor. He is the real-life Iron Man. He is one of the greatest builders of all time,” the background voices say. As the montage progresses, the tone of the statements changes. “He is the greatest capitalist in history. He’s chaotic, random, capricious, manifestly cruel and selfish. He’s a fascist,” the backtrack continues. 

“Elon is a nuke,” the voice in the teaser concludes as a spacecraft hits the ground and implodes, bursting into flames. 

Gibney first revealed in March 2023 that he had begun work on the documentary and was “many months” into production. Musk responded to news of the project on his X/Twitter account by predicting it would be “a hit piece.” Gibney fired back on the same platform, asking “how would you know?”

The film, with a nearly four-hour running time, will feature an original song from Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who wrote and performed the new track entitled “Let Me Sell You a Dream.”

Gibney directs and produces “Musk,” joined by Jessie Deeter and Erin Edeiken for Jigsaw Productions, Dana O’Keefe for Double Agent, Joey Marra and Zhang Xin for Closer Media and Anonymous Content’s Nick Shumaker and Jessica Grimshaw. Ronan Farrow and Lawrence Wright round out the producing team.

Watch the full teaser here: