Alex Gibney's Musk Documentary Argues the Pitch Is the Product
Alex Gibney has made a documentary about Elon Musk. Simply titled Musk and described by Ars Technica as covering a lot of well-known ground, its real move is to challenge the carefully crafted public image of Musk as a visionary tech titan. The substitute portrait on offer is a Gilded Age confidence man, rejiggered for the 21st century: an investor cosplaying as an inventor whose real genius is pumping stocks and dazzling investors and the public alike with visions of a high-tech utopian future. That is a sharper claim than plain overrated-ness. It treats the future-tense pitch as the product, which is a hard thing to disprove from the outside: nobody can audit a utopia, but you can watch who buys the story.
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The review also notes the film is built to press outrage buttons whether you arrive as a Musk fan or a detractor, which makes it a creature of the social-media era as much as a documentary.
Symmetric outrage is a strange thing to be proud of. Confirming a detractor's priors and needling a fan are two different jobs, and doing both at once doesn't mean anyone has been persuaded of anything.
If the thesis is an investor cosplaying as an inventor, the sting is aimed at the believers. The pitch only works on people who already want to buy it.