Musk
When we have all the evidence we need that Elon Musk is a self-aggrandizing narcissist on his Twitter account, is a nearly four-hour documentary necessary to essentially connect the dots? Musk is not an individual cloaked in mystery like L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, and the primary subject of Alex Gibney’s 2015 film, “Going Clear,” but Gibney sees the film format as a way to bring the material into a streamlined narrative. I’m not going to lie- four hours was probably too long for the film, but “Musk” does hold our attention because, even with awareness of Musk and his various ventures, he’s a fascinating individual because of the fact that his view of himself is so disparate to a lot of people’s view of him.
The more you think about the business ventures Musk is known for prior to his purchase of Twitter in 2022, there is value in what he is trying to accomplish when it comes to Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink. Each of those are ways to streamline space travel; helped popularize electric cars, and bring internet access to a larger amount of people. But should one person- whose fortune came from his South African father- be in charge of all of those things? That is where the ethical quandary of “Musk” is captured at its clearest.
Naturally, Gibney could not get Musk himself to sit down and talk. So what he did was make an AI rendering of Musk, appearing to be in a sort of spacecraft, and take tweets of his and other quotes to be his words. This is a novel approach to using archival material to supplement the material used in old interviews and footage. While I typically dislike AI being used for a film, this feels appropriate because it gets to how inhuman Musk feels when we hear him speak nowadays. His bizarre reactions, his painful attempts at humor, his delusions of grandeur, it all fits extremely well. It also gets us to one part of Musk’s ventures that have only started to get major notice since his acquisition of Twitter- the proliferation of his experimenting with AI. Even if you are not on Twitter- I haven’t really been since ’24- you have probably heard of Grok, which is the AI aspect of Twitter (which Musk renamed as X). For Musk, Grok is an attempt to get users to stay on the platform, and while it’s been hilarious to see his personal AI project seemingly get inhabited by the “woke mind virus” that Musk rails on about, more distressing has been seeing how users have used it to created CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Materials) and people using it to create other nude and sexually explicit images without the consent of the photographed party. Setting aside environmental impact of AI usage, I would say this is a perfectly ethical use of AI when it comes to covering someone who has no qualms with people abusing it.
“Musk” is engrossing in how it’s packaged together, and there’s so much more to discuss about it. How it explores the false advertising- and rushed rollout- in Tesla’s “hands free” driving, which has resulted in many deaths. How Musk seemingly has control over Starlink to the point where, if he wants to shut it off to Ukranian forces, for example, during their war with Russia, he can do that. And how Space X almost has a stranglehold on priorities we have in space exploration. That alone makes Musk one of the most dangerous people in the world. You add to that his experiments in AI and neurolinks, as well as his owning of X, and how he enforces “free speech” on the platform, Gibney’s film makes a strong case for someone like him not having his own technological empire. Something has to give.
