EXCLUSIVE: Bleecker Street is moving up the theatrical release of Musk – to October 9 – in response to intense interest in the documentary about the world’s richest man.
Alex Gibney’s film, which runs 3 hours and 45 minutes with a 10-minute intermission, holds its North American premiere later Monday at the Toronto Film Festival. Its world premiere took place last week under the klieg lights of Venice, triggering a huge response. Among those weighing in – Musk himself: in an hours long rant on his X/Twitter platform (which my colleague Jake Kanter characterized as “vicious and sometimes bizarre”), the tech mogul called Gibney a “bitter old man who lost the plot long ago” and branded him a “horrible human.” One of his posts included a graphic from the @DogeDesigner X account (closely associated with Musk) that suggested Gibney was a puppet of the Democratic Party and “team Soros” – a reference to progressive philanthropist and investor George Soros, who while very wealthy is a pauper compared to Musk.
The Musk documentary originally was set to hit theaters on October 16 but now arrives a week earlier. After the October 9 debut in New York and Los Angeles, it will expand to theaters nationwide.
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Musk enjoys a 100 percent positive critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In my review posted September 8, I wrote the film “depicts the world’s richest man as petty, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, cruel, detached from humans at a personal level (including various ex-partners and many of his children) while purporting to want to save humanity by colonizing Mars. A real prince. Musk, in my view, gives Elon the takedown he richly deserves.”
The documentary paints a negative picture of Musk’s business ethics and his personal conduct. Hi first wife, Justine Musk, and one of his baby mamas, the former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, are among the former romantic partners of Musk who appear in the film (Justine reports Musk falsely claimed to have held their infant son Nevada in his arms as the 10-week-old died. She says Elon wasn’t there and that she held Nevada as he died).
St. Clair is at the center of the most serious concerns raised in the documentary. She reports Musk told her he would exploit “an anomaly in the matrix” to ensure Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2024, citing his access to “space lasers,” an apparent reference to Musk’s network of Starlink satellites. Musk denied that through a lawyer.
As Deadline’s Jake Kanter reported, “The New York Post cited a legal letter from Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro, in which the lawyer wrote: ‘You are … on notice, before release, that the insinuation is false, that the material refuting it is public, and that you chose not to be told the rest.’”
That letter does not seem to have dissuaded Bleecker Street from releasing the documentary in theaters, a debut set to happen in less than a month.
