Alex Gibney‘s long-gestating Elon Musk documentary is finally ready for showtime. Musk, the Oscar winner’s years-in-the-making portrait of the controversial technocrat cum oligarch, will premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September — and it arrives at a scale perhaps befitting the world’s first trillionaire: 232 minutes, just shy of four hours.
Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera revealed the selection in Rome Thursday while unveiling the festival’s 2026 lineup, and he paused to make sure the audience appreciated just how much Elon has been packed into Gibney’s examination. “I invite you to look at the duration of the movie — four hours,” Barbera said with a wry smile.
“[Gibney] traces the whole career — the contradictions, and the conditioning power that is centralized in the hands of a single man,” the festival chief added. “Consider a genius of capitalist entrepreneurship, but also a dangerous technocrat, with no moral scruples.”
Few recent documentaries of such high profile have had such a long and tricky trip to screen. Gibney first revealed he was at work on the film in March 2023, billing it as a “definitive and unvarnished examination” of the Tesla, SpaceX and X chief. The director reportedly delivered a finished cut in early 2025 — only to return to the editing suite amid Musk’s vocal support and financial backing of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, followed by his stint next door to the Oval Office as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As Musk continued generating controversial headlines, those following Gibney’s project naturally began to wonder when and how the director would ever be able to wrap up the movie.
Last summer, the film’s backers, HBO Documentary Films and Bleecker Street, acknowledged their director’s predicament, putting out a joint statement, saying: “The film continues to grow in scope as the story evolves.”
And there was still more to come… Last month, SpaceX’s record-shattering IPO — the largest public offering in history, raising some $75 billion at a roughly $1.8 trillion valuation — lifted Musk’s fortune to the mind-bogglingly obscene point that he is now regarded as the world’s first trillionaire.
Musk has been characteristically unrestrained in his reaction to the documentary.
“It’s a hit piece,” he posted on X when the project was first reported in 2023, prompting Gibney to reply: “How would you know?”
Musk also once tweeted — “Gibney is a douche” — to which, Gibney has said he responded: “douché.”
Bleecker Street will release Musk in U.S. theaters on Oct. 16, with HBO Documentary Films holding North American television and streaming rights and Black Bear handling international sales. Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions produced with Zhang Xin’s Closer Media, Double Agent and Anonymous Content.
Gibney has spent the past three decades of his career critiquing powerful institutions and the men who run them. He won the best documentary feature Oscar for 2007’s Taxi to the Dark Side, was nominated for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and won widespread critical acclaim for Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. He’s tackled Silicon Valley icons and villains before, too, with projects like Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine and the Elizabeth Holmes exposé The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. He is no stranger to the Lido, having premiered his Mikhail Khodorkovsky portrait Citizen K there in 2019.
The 83rd Venice Film Festival runs Sept. 2-12.
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