Alex Gibney’s documentary about Elon Musk opens in US theaters on Friday, October 9. Musk premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September to a minutes-long standing ovation.
Since Musk declined to take part, Gibney built a digital stand-in. An AI-generated Musk avatar reads the real Musk’s past quotes throughout a film made largely from his own words. Journalists like Kara Swisher and his ex-wife Justine Musk fill in the rest.
Gibney is a renowned director behind some of my favorite modern documentaries, like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), which I saw in theaters, and The Inventor, HBO’s 2019 documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.
HBO has streaming rights, so most of us will eventually see it at home, and with a 4-hour runtime, probably in more than one sitting.
This was originally posted as a New Arrival in Lowered Barriers to Entry · The Catalog · №008, an issue of my weekly newsletter The Catalog. You can Subscribe for weekly insights, or get in touch to talk about what this means for your business.