Alex Gibney on ‘Musk’ and Why a 4-Hour Film Was Necessary

The documentarian also talks about trying to interview the trillionaire and the roadblocks the film has run into.

The documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has long been interested in tales of unchecked power, from turning Enron’s collapse into an entertaining crime story to revealing, in the Academy Award-winning “Taxi to the Dark Side,” the U.S. policy on torture. So it wasn’t a surprise when a group of investors approached him about taking on Elon Musk. It was 2022.

But Gibney was wary: Wasn’t there already enough out there on the world’s richest man? At the time, Walter Isaacson was writing a book on him, the authorized biography “Elon Musk,” published in 2023. Films about the quest to make the electric car and the dangers of artificial intelligence had prominently featured Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and a co-founder of OpenAI. But then a friend explained that this was Gibney’s chance to examine 21st-century power. What Gibney didn’t expect was that it would also be a chance to examine how tech power had become political power.