Alex Gibney’s 232-minute documentary; ‘Musk’ premieres at Venice this week, featuring an Oscar-qualifying original song from David Byrne built entirely from Musk’s own words.
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 September 8, before continuing to the Toronto International Film Festival. Bleecker Street distributes, with a theatrical release planned for October.
In the 48-second teaser, montages of spacecraft and astronautical devices fill the screen while a chorus of voices offer sharply varied commentary on Musk. “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 voices say early on. The tone shifts as the montage progresses. “He is the greatest capitalist in history. He’s chaotic, random, capricious, manifestly cruel and selfish. He’s a fascist,” the teaser continues, with one voice adding that he wouldn’t even qualify as a hero in a science fiction novel. “Elon is a nuke,” a final voice concludes, as a spacecraft hits the ground and implodes into flames.
What Gibney Says He’s Actually Going For?
Gibney, whose previous films include Taxi to the Dark Side and Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, has described Musk as a modern confidence man who has mastered the construction of his own heroic image. Rather than accepting the familiar narrative of a visionary entrepreneur trying to save humanity, Gibney says he approaches that mythology from multiple angles, examining what he calls the machinery operating behind the curtain. He’s called the finished film “a definitive and unvarnished examination” of Musk’s power across business, technology, media, and politics. The documentary features interviews with tech journalist Kara Swisher, Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, journalist Zoë Schiffer, and Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, among others.
Gibney first revealed in March 2023 that he’d begun work on the project and was “many months” into production. Musk responded to news of it on X, predicting it would be “a hit piece.” Gibney fired back on the same platform, asking, “How would you know?”
Oscar-Qualifying Song Built From Musk’s Own Words
At 232 minutes, just shy of four hours, Musk stands as one of the more ambitious nonfiction portraits of Gibney’s career. It closes with an original song from Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, titled “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” co-written with composer Daniel Pemberton, whose credits include Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Trial of the Chicago 7. The lyrics are built entirely from things Musk has actually said publicly. “I asked for good quotes from the Martian, and found more of them online,” Byrne told Variety. Gibney called the result “kick-ass,” adding that Byrne “dug deep into the sayings of Musk himself to get to extremely hard-core, foot-tapping sardonic poetry.” The track has already been entered into Oscar contention for Best Original Song at the 2027 Academy Awards.
Watch The Musk Teaser Below:
