Good news for those who can’t get enough Elon Musk coverage: director Alex Gibney, whose previous films include Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, Zero Days, and The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, is working on a documentary about the man. As Variety quotes producer Zhang Xin, “a rigorous portrait of Elon Musk” is the film’s goal.
The current working title for the project is “Musk,” as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. There isn’t much known about the documentary at this time other than its title and the impression that it will be examining one of the world’s richest men and most famous tech CEOs in depth. There is no information available about when it will be released (or even if it will be released this year) or what specific aspects of Musk’s professional and personal life it will highlight. After working on it “on and off, for some time,” as Gibney told Deadline, the project is finally coming together.
We can expect additional Musk documentaries in the future. Two documentaries and a TV show dedicated to Elon Musk have been released in his honor: 2018’s Elon Musk: The Real Life Iron Man and 2022’s The Elon Musk Show on the BBC. In addition to those two films, he has a role in Netflix’s Return to Space, which is about the aerospace company SpaceX, and in the artificial intelligence film Do You Trust This Computer?
Gibney is known for his sharp criticism. In documentaries such as The Smartest Guys in the Room, Dirty Money, and Going Clear, he assisted in investigating Enron, Volkswagen, the Church of Scientology, and other institutions. Even more importantly, he has previously expressed some criticism of Musk, so I wouldn’t put any stock in Musk turning out to be a gushing profile. Even though I’m familiar with Gibney’s skill at breaking down complicated ideas into digestible chunks, and have enjoyed many of his previous works, I find myself wondering whether or not it’s even possible to understand and communicate whatever’s going on at Twitter these days.
