Commentary: Elon Musk threatens to sue over a new doc about him. But the film festival crowd loves it
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Set us as preferred The biggest news to come out of two film festivals this week stemmed from documentaries about tech moguls gone bad.When Alex Gibney’s film production “Musk” premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, it received a five-minute standing ovation, shouts of “thank you” from the audience and endless play across social media.The nearly four-hour production chronicles the rise of the world’s first trillionaire out of the dot-com boom, and lays bare the dangers that the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive now presents as a plutocrat with questionable judgment and unchecked power.Closer to home, at the Telluride Film Festival, it was comedian Nathan Fielder (“The Rehearsal”) and Lance Oppenheim’s “You Can See Everything” that made breaking news.
Their film features unfettered access to former Theranos Chief Executive Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before she reported to federal prison to serve a sentence of 10 years and three months.She rode the early 2000s wave of venture-capitalism consumer-tech hype, defrauding investors and the public with a bogus new way to test blood.
By 2014, she was the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.Movies ‘You Can See Everything,’ co-directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, offers extraordinary access to the convicted Theranos founder before taking a reality-bending turn.A couple of decades ago, films about Musk and Holmes probably would have framed the pair as forward-thinking entrepreneurs and architects of a new era.
Today, the pitchforks are out, and who else better represents the hubris and greed of late-stage capitalism?There’s plenty of buzz around both films ahead of their October releases, yet the richest man in the world is helping promote the “Musk” doc by incessantly posting about Gibney and his “hit” piece.Musk’s X p...