One of the country’s most acclaimed documentary filmmakers is tackling the world’s richest man, and the Toronto Film Fest will be one of the first places viewers can witness the encounter. TIFF announced Tuesday that it will premiere Alex Gibney’s four-hour Elon Musk opus Musk, injecting a charge of current events into the gathering and even setting the stage for battles across mainstream and social media.
The film will premiere in Venice several days earlier. But the presence of the movie on these shores — with the concurrent attention and potential Musk-led backlash — promises to set in motion a real-world conversation about wealth, power and politics the film-fest universe gets only rarely.“We’re talking about someone who has a Marvel villain-like level of power over our lives, from electric cars to space travel to AI to government to social media,” the fest’s doc chief Thom Powers told The Hollywood Reporter. “And you have Alex Gibney making the most ambitious movie of his illustrious career about him.”Musk famously attacked the film on X earlier in its production cycle in 2023 by saying “It’s a hit piece,” with Gibney famously retorting “How would you know?” The mogul has only become a greater cultural lightning rod since then with a relentless series of social media trolls and the platforming of numerous conspiracy theories. The massive IPO for SpaceX in June that made Musk the world’s first trillionaire has only added to the stakes.
