Alex Gibney’s long-awaited documentary about Elon Musk is premiering at the Venice Film Festival on September 8, bringing a nearly four-hour examination of one of technology’s most powerful figures to one of cinema’s biggest stages. Rather than treating Musk’s companies as a conventional story of entrepreneurial success, the film focuses on something broader: how Musk constructed his public identity, how that image has shaped perceptions of his businesses and ambitions, and what happens when a filmmaker deliberately dismantles the familiar framing.

The documentary, simply titled Musk, is screening out of competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. The Venice Biennale’s official program describes it as an examination of the legend surrounding Musk and his extraordinary influence. The film runs nearly four hours, including an intermission, according to Associated Press reporting, and is expected to reach North American theaters in October.

Gibney began from a very different position

The film is directed by Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning documentarian whose previous investigations have examined Enron, Scientology, Elizabeth Holmes and other institutions or personalities associated with concentrated power. What makes Musk particularly interesting is Gibney’s account of how his own view changed while making it. He told the Associated Press that he began the project as something of an admirer and initially hoped Musk would agree to an interview.

Musk ultimately declined to participate. Gibney said his subsequent investigation led him to reconsider the popular image of Musk as a modern-day polymath comparable to Leonardo da Vinci. That evolution gives the documentary a different premise from a straightforward hostile profile: the filmmaker says he started with one understanding of his subject and arrived somewhere else after examining the evidence.

Musk has already rejected the project’s framing. He previously described the documentary as a “hit piece” before its release. Without his participation, the film necessarily builds its portrait through other interviews, archival material and the public record rather than a new extended conversation with Musk himself. That absence will also be part of the debate around the film: critics and viewers will have to judge whether Gibney has produced a sufficiently complete portrait of a subject who declined to make his own case on camera.

The film targets the machinery of Musk’s image

Gibney’s director’s statement suggests that the documentary is interested not only in what Musk has done but in how those achievements are framed. He uses the cinematic idea of a “master shot” as a metaphor for the dominant public narrative around Musk: entrepreneur, inventor, technological visionary and advocate for a multiplanetary human future. Gibney says his approach was to abandon that master framing and examine the story from other angles.

That is a particularly relevant approach to Musk because his public persona is inseparable from the companies associated with him. Tesla’s electric cars, SpaceX’s reusable rockets and Starlink satellite network are not merely products or infrastructure projects; they have become components of a larger story about technological acceleration and the individual capable of driving it. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now X, further blurred the boundary between executive power, media influence and personal communication.

The documentary therefore arrives at a moment when assessing Musk requires looking beyond any single company. His influence spans automobiles, rockets, satellite communications, artificial intelligence and online discourse. A biography organized purely around business milestones would risk missing how those ventures reinforce one another in the public imagination and how Musk’s own communications amplify that effect.

Venice gives the documentary an unusually prominent launch

The premiere is part of a high-profile day at Venice. Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem are appearing in Florian Zeller’s psychological thriller Bunker, while Casey Affleck is presenting Company. Bunker follows an architect whose decision to construct a survivalist bunker for a billionaire strains his marriage, placing themes of ecological anxiety, inequality and individualism alongside the festival’s real-world examination of billionaire power.

The juxtaposition is striking even though the films are unrelated. On the same day that a fictional billionaire’s fears become the catalyst for a drama starring Cruz and Bardem, Gibney’s documentary examines the real-world power accumulated around perhaps the technology industry’s most recognizable billionaire. Venice is effectively hosting two very different cultural treatments of wealth, anxiety and influence at once.

Musk is not competing for the Golden Lion, but its placement at Venice gives it a platform normally associated with major awards-season releases and prestige filmmaking. The festival has increasingly become an important launch point for documentaries as well as narrative films, and the enormous public interest surrounding Musk means the movie is likely to generate discussion far beyond film criticism.

A four-hour runtime signals an argument about scale

The length itself is revealing. Nearly four hours is an unusual commitment for a theatrical documentary, but Musk’s footprint makes compression difficult. A serious assessment can quickly move from Tesla and electric vehicles to SpaceX, Starlink, social media, artificial intelligence, politics, wealth and the culture of technological celebrity. Each subject carries its own history and controversies.

That scale also creates a challenge for Gibney. A documentary this ambitious must distinguish between criticism of Musk as a person, scrutiny of his management and public behavior, and evaluation of companies that employ tens of thousands of engineers and other workers. Musk’s public mythology may overstate the role of a single individual in complex technological achievements, but an argument that swings too far in the opposite direction could understate the unusual influence he has exercised over those organizations.

The more interesting question is therefore not whether viewers leave the theater liking or disliking Musk. It is whether the documentary can explain the relationship between technological achievement, corporate power and the carefully maintained narrative of the singular visionary. That question extends beyond Musk to the broader technology industry, where founders are frequently transformed into symbols for work produced by enormous organizations.

The argument starts before audiences see the film

Because Musk declined to participate and has already dismissed the project, Musk enters Venice with its central conflict established in advance. Gibney presents the film as an effort to interrogate a powerful public narrative; Musk has characterized it as an attack. The documentary’s reception will depend on whether its evidence supports the filmmaker’s reframing rather than simply replacing one mythology with another.

That makes the Venice premiere more than another celebrity documentary launch. Musk has spent years operating simultaneously as an executive, technology promoter and prolific media personality, while his companies have become important parts of transportation, communications and space infrastructure. A film questioning how that public identity was constructed is inevitably also asking how modern technological power is understood.

When Musk reaches wider audiences, its most consequential contribution may not be a new revelation about one billionaire. It may be whether Gibney can show, over an unusually long running time, how the story of an individual becomes fused with the story of technologies and companies that affect millions of people—and how difficult it becomes to separate the two once that mythology is established.