Alex Gibney premiered his Elon Musk documentary out of competition at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, and the trades covering the festival put its question bluntly: is Musk a fascist or a great inventor. Variety, Deadline and The Wrap all reported the running time at 235 minutes. Nearly four hours.
Bleecker Street sells it as "an incisive look behind the legend of Elon Musk, the wealthiest, and most unchecked, man on the planet."
Gibney made the Enron film, the Scientology film and the Theranos film, and he has spent several years on this one. In the teaser he sends Musk's rockets up and then apart while people describe him in terms he would not have chosen. Bleecker Street puts the film in theatres on 16 October, according to the trades, and HBO airs it later this year.
Nobody outside Venice has seen the film. What can be said today is who is asking the question, and when they started.
Narativ named Musk as the centre of Russia's 2024 election operation on 13 November 2024, eight days after the vote.
Nikolai Patrushev, Putin's former FSB chief and likely successor, said Trump "relied on certain forces" to win and now "has corresponding obligations" to them. Narativ reported what those forces were: a Kremlin operation that ran through Musk for more than two years, with his $44 billion purchase of Twitter at its centre. Putin and Musk talked before, during and after the deal, Narativ found. Russian oligarch family members put money into it. X worked directly with the Social Design Agency, a front for Russian intelligence, and rewrote its algorithm to push the Kremlin's stories.
Olga Lautman put the price at more than $45 billion, spent to launder Russian narratives through X and right-wing media. Musk's own PAC paid for a $45 million campaign of ads dressed as Harris messaging, the Washington Post found: pro-Israel ads for Muslim voters, anti-Israel ads for Jewish voters, menthol warnings for Black voters.
Narativ traced the Musk-Putin contact to 2021, found it intensified in 2022 as the Twitter deal closed, and connected Musk to Sergey Kiriyenko, Putin's propaganda chief. A leaked Social Design Agency document tied Musk to the Kremlin's disinformation work. Narativ set out the finding in "The Musk Files" in January 2025: Musk sat at the heart of the Kremlin's operation to elect Trump.
Then the phones.
The FCC handed SpaceX emergency authority in late October 2024, during Hurricane Milton, to connect Starlink satellites directly to any cell phone in America, on any carrier. The authority ran through 5 November. Narativ reported in June 2025 that more than 330 direct-to-cell satellites were already working by then, while the public was told the service would launch in January 2025. During Hurricane Helene, 270,000 phones on every carrier had connected to them. Narativ found the same link could reach voting machines and tabulators without any new hardware.
Trump said it himself at his victory party: Musk "understands those computers better than anyone else. All those computers. The ones used for counting votes. We ended up securing Pennsylvania by a significant margin." Musk told Joe Rogan an app showed him the result before anyone announced it. Whether any voting system touched a satellite remains unexamined.
Gibney needed four hours and a Venice premiere to ask who is really behind Elon Musk. Narativ answered in November 2024 and again in "The Musk Files" that January, and by June 2025 had shown Starlink connected to every American phone before the vote: Putin's calls, the oligarch money, the satellites. Nobody credited it. Nobody has checked the satellites either.
