Alex Gibney spent four years getting inside Elon Musks head. Now he wants Musk out of his

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Set us as preferred Elon Musk has called director Alex Gibney a “bitter old man,” a “horrible human” and less deserving of respect than dog excrement.He has accused the Oscar-winning filmmaker, whose documentaries have tackled Scientology, Enron, Lance Armstrong and Elizabeth Holmes, of having “zero integrity” and dismissed his movies as “boring af.” And to his hundreds of millions of followers on X, Musk reposted an image of Gibney with a poop emoji on his head.

“It’s an improvement,” he wrote.The occasion for all this abuse is “Musk,” Gibney’s damning, nearly four-hour documentary about the trillionaire, which hits theaters in Los Angeles and New York Friday after causing a stir on the festival circuit.Yet the 72-year-old Gibney seems unbothered by the barrage as he logs on to Zoom in a black hoodie from his home in Brooklyn, fresh from a Sunday game of tennis.“Do I get a lot of angry tweets from Elon and his pals? Yes, and I’m sure that will ramp up once the film is out,” Gibney says.Still, he admits, “I don’t want to have him inside my head all the time.

It’s punishing.” Hence the tennis.“He’s the richest man on Earth but he’s also sort of a stubborn adolescent at the same time,” Gibney says.“He’s both a guy with real power and a sort of human meme.” Drawing on interviews with Musk’s family, former friends and employees, journalists and business associates — though not Musk himself — Gibney traces the tech entrepreneur’s epic rise and the mythology that grew with it: a real-life Tony Stark who would conquer space and help save humanity.

As Musk’s personal life becomes more chaotic and his public behavior more erratic, his power only expands, from self-driving cars and rockets to his takeover of Twitter and rechristening of it as X, artificial intelligence ...