In December 2021, Elon Musk sat for an interview with The Babylon Bee, a conservative satire site. Having covered the typical topics (wokeness, free speech, Elizabeth Warren) and finding themselves with a bit more time to fill, the outlet’s then–creative director closed out the chat with a request. “The Babylon Bee is a Christian organization, and we’re a ministry,” he reminded Musk. So “we’re wondering if you could do us a quick solid and accept Jesus as your lord and savior?”
Musk laughed. The others did too. The guys waited for an answer, and Musk, after rambling a bit, gave one. Sure, he replied with a shrug—why not? “If Jesus is saving people,” he said, “I mean, I won’t stand in his way.”
The exchange makes a brief but incredibly effective appearance in Musk, the documentarian Alex Gibney’s new film: Asked for a come-to-Jesus moment, Musk professes his faith in himself. The Musk of 2021 was considerably less consequential than the Musk of today. He had not yet added Twitter—humanity’s “collective consciousness,” he once called it—to his portfolio, nor had he staged his hostile takeover of the United States government or become the world’s first trillionaire. Still, Musk had slightly more reason than most to assume his high status on the cosmic org chart.
Through Tesla and Starlink and SpaceX, his dominion stretched over the heavens and the Earth. Through Neuralink and his assorted experiments with artificial intelligence, Musk was expanding his reach into human hearts and minds. As a media figure, too, he was all but inescapable: a piece of software downloaded into people’s lives whether they had opted in to him or not.
Power, at that sort of scale, changes every equation. It can make hyperbole seem accurate. It can make a man, small and flawed, look like something more: a genius, an idol, an outlet for everyday faith. And the discrepancy between the person Musk is and the figure he claims to be is one of Musk’s running themes. The man sells himself as a savior; many have before. But he is where he is—he is what he is—because so many people have bought into the pitch. Delusions of grandeur are one thing. The real trouble comes when one person’s delusions become other people’s reality.
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Musk benefits, appropriately enough, from an exercise in data science. The man himself did not participate; he declined Gibney’s overtures in the most Muskian manner imaginable: through an insult-laden post on X. As a work-around, the director and his team created a database compiling every comment Musk has been recorded making in public. That data set—a galaxy-brained version of Musk—informed their assessment of him and individual moments in the film. Muskisms (about the likelihood that earthly life is a simulation, about the drawbacks of empathy, about humans’ future on Mars) make their way into the proceedings via a computer-generated version of Musk—an animated character who appears where, in a traditional documentary, Gibney might have quoted his subject.
To an extent, the approach turns the tables on Musk. It renders this person who talks fondly of humans’ cyborgian future as a cartoonishly uncanny, flagrantly inhuman presence. But it also highlights his cultural status as a man who is, at this point, something more than just a man.
The sources that Musk cites as it creates its portrait—among them the people who have worked with and lived with and, often, clashed with Musk—regularly mention the scale of his ego and the scope of his ambition. They attribute much of his success to his mythmaking capabilities: his romantic descriptions of technology, his branding of consumer goods as spiritual necessities. Tesla, Musk’s car company, “is not automobile manufacturing or automobile retailing,” the financial analyst Lawrence Fossi tells Gibney. “This is not finance”; instead, he says, it is religion. The mythology extends to Musk himself. “In Elon We Trust,” one of Musk’s followers once tweeted at him, in a post Gibney included in the film. Another informed him, “We follow you like a cult :).”
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A former girlfriend says in the film that Musk likes to compare himself to Kublai Khan, the 13th-century Mongolian warrior and emperor of China. And indeed, his megalomania is in one way a very old story: Human history has, for better and worse, been shaped by men who insisted on their godlike supremacy. But Musk’s version is also thoroughly modern. His power is systemic. His sieges rise from within.
One of the allegations the film makes against Musk concerns his incursion into the U.S. government: DOGE’s haphazard dismantling of government agencies, its destruction of scientific research, its toppling of USAID. The widespread effects of DOGE’s efforts—the cures that won’t be found; the vaccines that won’t be made; the food meant to save lives, left instead to rot—will likely never be fully known. Nevertheless, Musk argues, the raid has had a death toll: hundreds of thousands of people, and potentially many more.
When such accusations are made, the public might ask, and should ask, what accountability looks like at that level. But one of the affordances of planet-spanning power is that it can turn justice, as most people experience it, into something of a joke. If Musk is a category error incarnate—a man with, effectively, a gross national product; a guy whose influence extends beyond the stratosphere—the confusion does more than elevate him. It also helps inoculate him. The film quotes a newscaster’s summary of one of SpaceX’s early launches. “Only four entities have launched a space capsule into orbit and successfully brought it back to the Earth,” the reporter announces: “the United States, Russia, China, and Elon Musk.”
How do you make sense of that kind of power? How do you challenge it? One truism of modern life is that humans, as animals who would prefer to pretend that they are otherwise, were not made to thrive at our current scale. We weren’t meant to know this many people, to process this much information, to make sense of a world that stretches so far beyond our immediate grasp. Musk provides a corollary to those claims: It gives us a human who himself has become too colossal to make sense of, too unwieldy to respond to. Even more than his fellow tech titans, Musk exists at a scale that no man was able to before and enjoys power so complete that it becomes self-ratifying.
No man should be so godlike. No person should be so exceptional. In the film, Musk’s former girlfriend sums up the matter concisely: “Elon is a nuke,” she says—a human of mass destruction.