“Musk”, interview with director Alex Gibney

Presented in the Open section, out of competition, at the Venice Film Festival 2026, Musk is Alex Gibney‘s incisive look behind the legend of Elon Musk, the world’s most heralded “inventor-entrepreneur,” who exerts an enormous influence on the world in which we all live.

Rather than building the film around a single, defining “master shot” that would confirm Musk’s own preferred image, as Gibney explains in his director’s statement, he chose to explore the story from different angles, reframing Musk as, in his words, “the 21st century reincarnation of the confidence man.” Alex Gibney talks about the narrative that built Musk’s power, the concept of “enshitification,” and Musk’s relationship with Donald Trump.

A Narrative, Not a Modern Leonardo da Vinci

Asked whether the film is about Musk or about the society that enabled him, Gibney answers: “I think it’s both. I think it’s about him, but it’s also about us. And one of the questions the film seeks to answer is: how did we allow him to take so much power over us?”

The answer, for Gibney, comes down to storytelling: “In a word, simply bullshit. He created a narrative about himself and about his companies that is completely unreal. But he did it so compellingly, with such confidence, that we came to believe it.”

That narrative, he explains, is what actually underpins Musk’s wealth: “His companies make rockets that are spectacular to watch, and many people like to drive Teslas, but his fortune is built on stock and the inflation of stock. That’s where his power comes from. And the stock is not based on any kind of economic fundamentals — it’s based on a vision of him as a kind of modern Leonardo da Vinci, which he is not.”

Enshitification: Capitalism Speculating on What Doesn’t Work

For Gibney, the film also points to a wider problem with how capitalism today rewards companies that don’t actually function. He cites one of his interview subjects, the science fiction author and tech writer Corey Doctorow: “He coined a term called ‘enshitification.’ What enshitification means is, once you achieve a certain market power, you actually intentionally make your products worse, because people are addicted to them and they can’t go anywhere else. It becomes a process by which you make more money by making your products worse.”

“That’s not what we imagined when we thought of the invention of the capitalist system, which is supposed to lead to a bounteous world of riches.”

A Marriage of Convenience with Trump

Asked why Musk has aligned himself with Donald Trump and America’s ultra-conservative movement, Gibney pushes back on the framing itself: “I think he believes that he’s the puppet master. In other words, that he helped to elect Trump. I don’t think Trump is in the White House without Elon Musk. And so long as he flatters Trump, Trump does exactly what Elon Musk wants him to do.”

He sums up the relationship in blunt terms: “He has the money to keep Trump in power, and Trump has the power to keep Elon Musk in the money. So I think it’s a marriage of convenience and profit.”

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