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.
