We’d all like to imagine, were we to wake up one day to find ourselves insanely wealthy billionaires with our own cult of sycophants, corporate yes-men, and a whole host of monkeys with chips surgically jammed into their brains at our beck and call, that this massive largesse would occupy us enough that we wouldn’t feel the compulsion to spend our days looking at what people are saying about us on social media. The parable of Elon Musk, however, teaches us that this might simply be impossible: That there’s no amount of money or power that can combat the ugly human impulse to try to Post Through It.
These musings brought to us by a new push that Musk has been making on Twitter/X this Wednesday to discredit Alex Gibney’s Musk, the massive 3.5-hour documentary about the entrepreneur/monkey problem creator that debuted at the Venice International Film Festival this week. Reviews for Gibney’s film have been positive, which is certainly more than you can say about the movie’s opinion of its subject: Gibney reportedly does not hide the fact that he considers Musk to be a con artist who has amassed inordinate amounts of power over our modern tech and political lives. (Including what’s apparently a pretty extensive section on Musk’s brief tenure running the Trump administration’s DOGE department, and the amount of access to American’s data that he and his team received, with very little oversight, at the time.)
Musk being Musk, he’s responded to Gibney’s films by hopping on Twitter to denounce Musk as a “hit piece,” deride the movie as “boring”—although it’s not clear if he’s actually seen it—and repost pictures of Gibney with feces on top of his head. “He has ZERO integrity. Horrible human,” Musk wrote in a slightly less scatological mood, before returning to more familiar territory: “Dogshit is worth more respect.” Dialing into specifics, Musk attacked one of the many women who he’s fathered children with, Ashley St. Clair, who appears in the film. Musk discounts that St. Clair was ever offered $40 million to sign an NDA about him, writing, “She was never offered that and has a history of making false claims.”
Musk the film arrives in theaters on October 16 courtesy of Bleecker Street; we assume Musk the man will be having an extremely normal one when the chance for people to actually see the movie finally rolls around.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.