Elon Musk is many things; he has no problem letting you know what he wants you to know and no problem suppressing what he doesn’t want you to know.
That battle is being played out over the upcoming documentary “Musk,” an unvarnished look at the wealthiest man in the world who has elevated the Silicon Valley ethos, “Move Fast and Break Things” to the ultimate extreme.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney directs the nearly four-hour exposé, described as a highly critical dissection of the world’s richest man. It traces his journey from early entrepreneurial days to his immense influence over contemporary global politics, data collection, and artifical intelligence (AI).
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Musk seems intent on using his vast wealth and influence to supress the film, and it appears he’s making headway.
So far, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram and Facebook, all owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, have refused to run paid advertising for “Musk,” along with Musk’s social media site, “X,” according to The Hollywood Reporter (Editor’s Note: We found multiple copies of the trailer on YouTube; See below)
So, what is it Musk doesn’t want you to know?
The thread tying together all of Musk’s endeavors has been a singular apocalyptic vision of the world, and a haunting personal fear of economic and social collapse.
“Eventually, there is a certainty of a catastrophic outcome. If we don’t take corrective action the probability of a collapse will increase over time,” he told journalist Walter Isaacson at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in 2015.
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“The longer it takes to make that transition the greater the probability of something like that happening.
“What’s the fundamental good that Tesla can achieve? It would be to accelerate the advent of electric cars by at least a decade,” he said, reflecting his fears about climate change.
Musk is so driven, he may have become meglomanical. He dismisses democracy as a failed system of government and advocates a society controled by a small circle of elites.
Musk, and David Sacks, Palantir co-founders Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale, his advisor Jacob Heberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone and blogger Curtis Yarvin are part of an inner circle known as the “tech bros,” according to an eye-opening article by former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.
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Yarvin, the movement’s philosophical godfather, proclaims that democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; the country would be better served by sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime, Reich writes.
While the tech bros appear to be content staying in the shadows, Musk has literally leaped to the forefront through his close alliance with Donald Trump.
Megalomanics and demagogues have come and gone in U.S. history. Business figures like William Randolph Hearst, politicians like Huey Long and religious figures like Father Charles Coughlin were all obsessed with absolute personal power and playing off the prejudices and fears of ordinary people.
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Musk fits that category because like those of the past, he simply thinks he knows better and refuses to be restrained by such things as laws, social compacts or morality. Every generation gets the megalomaniacs and demagogues it deserves, and Musk and Trump make the perfect pairing for our era of vast income inequality, endless regional warfare and rapidly advancing technology.
The scary thing about the Musk and Trump partnership is the acute concentration of wealth and power and the potential to tear the social fabric that binds the nation together. The Constitution established a nation of laws; Musk and Trump are essentially lawless in a philosophical sense.
Laws are a hiderance to their goals and should be brushed aside when necessary in furtherance of those goals.
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Trump, for his part, was, is and always will be a petty conman. He’s mostly interested in amassing as much wealth as possible off the presidency while letting his thin ego and pretensions to greatness govern how he conducts himself in office.
But Musk is another story. Is he benevolent, or malevolent? Frankly, he’s both… whatever it takes to get what he wants.
The billionaire had no qualms about attacking Trump when their agendas clashed.
After Musk publicly criticized Trump’s legislative spending package, calling it a “disgusting abomination” in June a year ago, Trump called Elon Musk “crazy” and threatened to strip billions of dollars in federal subsidies and government contracts from Tesla and SpaceX.
Less than an hour later, Elon Musk dropped his now infamous Epstein allegation:
“Time to drop the really big bomb. @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
While he later said he went too far with the post, additional commentary, memes, and criticisms regarding the files emerged in waves through July 2025 and later periods when the administration faced renewed pressure over transparency, according to media reports.
Musk and Trump reconciled in January following a private dinner at Mar-a-Lago, and Musk has since vowed to protect Trump’s control of Congress by spending upwards of $200 million on the midterm elections.
Musk would be easy to understand if he was just about the money, like Trump. But he’s pursuing something far more dangerous… he’s pursuing an ideology that is just as insidious to democracy as the “Communist Manifesto” or “Mein Kampf.”
The documentary portrays Musk as a major threat to democracy who views “unlimited power as his natural possession.”
It looks deeply at his “Dark MAGA” political pivot, his weaponization of X (formerly Twitter), and his goal to render traditional government obsolete.
He’s promising a technological utopia — electric cars, autonomous vehicles, AI, spaceships to Mars — just like Karl Marx promised a proletarian utopia and Adolf Hitler promised a thousand-year Reich. Both required a dictatorship to achieve.
The question is, just how far will Musk go to attain his utopia. A measure of his intention will be just how far he will go to supress Gibney’s documentary. It’s scheduled for release this fall.
Here’s a trailer. Watch it while you can.
Keith Girard has four decades of experience as an award-winning reporter, editor-in-chief, and senior media executive. Keith’s career began in Washington, D.C., where he was a reporter for The Washington Post and a contributing editor for Regardie’s and Washingtonian magazines. He also worked as a writer/producer in CNN’s Washington Bureau and has written non-fiction books on the U.S. Marines in the Gulf War and Donald Trump and two novels, “The Heidelberg Conundrum” and “The Curse of Northam Bay.”