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Bloomberg Businessweek November 2026 |
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Год выпуска: November 2026 Автор: Bloomberg Businessweek Жанр: Экономика/Финансы Издательство: Bloomberg L.P. Формат: PDF (журнал на английском языке) Качество: OCR Количество страниц: 100 Elon Musk’s Citizen Kane MomentSeen from a certain distance, Elon Musk looks like he’s achieved escape velocity. Before 2024, his companies Tesla Inc. and SpaceX were threatened by federal investigations, class-action lawsuits and political feuds. They were also under threat from Musk himself, whose personal crises often spilled over into his professional life. These included divorces, a battle with depression, allegations of drug use, frequent own goals on social media, and all the drama that comes from having fathered at least 14 children. But power has a way of drowning things like that out. Since Donald Trump won a second term as president in 2024 with the help of roughly $300 million of Musk’s money, all that’s followed has left Musk firmly the richest human alive, with a degree of influence and wealth that no private individual has enjoyed since at least the Gilded Age. The second Trump administration, in less than two years, has enabled Musk to bully the regulators who investigated him during Joe Biden’s presidency, access vast swaths of valuable government data, install some of his closest allies in positions overseeing his business interests, thwart efforts to regulate AI in ways that have inflated the value of his companies, even hawk Teslas on the White House lawn. Most recently, the Trump team gave Musk the job of helping modernize the Pentagon, even though SpaceX is a major defense contractor, and on Oct. 8 awarded him the National Medal of Science. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index now pegs Musk’s worth at about $1 trillion, and though his companies are wildly overvalued by traditional investing metrics, he has a history of defying those. So it was an odd thing to sit down and watch all four hours of Musk, a messy, angry broadside of a documentary that digs through many of Musk’s most embarrassing moments and breaks some new ground. At a moment when polite society tends to mince words about Musk’s online rants and what the Anti-Defamation League euphemistically described as his “awkward gesture” at the inauguration, director Alex Gibney, best known for his awardwinning investigative takedowns of Enron, Scientology and the war on terror, is direct. Musk isn’t a subtle work about a great and complicated man, nor does it aim for balance. “We have one person who is this chaotic—who’s completely unelected— and has this much power,” Musk’s former friend, the podcaster Sam Harris, says in the movie, which went into wide release on Oct. 16. “It’s completely insane.” In some ways, this feels like screaming into the trilliondollar void, but it’s also a vivid reminder that Musk’s position doesn’t reflect his popularity, which has plummeted since he tied himself closely to Trump. Instead, his wealth depends in large part on a stock market that seems increasingly divorced from fundamentals and a populist president who’s very much in danger of losing the populace. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Gibney says that when he first began work on the film in 2022 he saw it as being friendly, even admiring. He began to get a different picture after Musk, who by that point had entered his poop emoji era of interpersonal relations, told him to buzz off. “Gibney is a douche,” Musk wrote on X in response to a news story about the project. “Douché,” the director wrote back. He sought out others in Musk’s orbit, notably Justine Musk, his first wife. Gibney says he gradually came to see his subject as the ultimate con man, able to convince anyone of anything, including those who love him most. The film mostly ignores the achievements that have made Musk beloved to a generation of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial aspirants—a defensible choice given how exhaustively covered those have been—and instead portrays him as a flimflam artist who’s taken undue credit for the creation of Tesla and pumped up his companies’ value by hawking wild fantasies of human settlements on Mars. Gibney’s decision to “interview” an AI-ified version of Musk using audio taken from others’ interviews is journalistically dicey, but it does get at an essential truth about Musk, which is that he’s turned himself into a human meme. “He’s the greatest stock pumper of all time,” Gibney tells Businessweek. “That’s his genius.” Musk covers the dark sides of the man’s business and personal life. Its most damning sequence involves video footage of a Tesla crash. Musk has spent years implying that his cars, which are not approved to drive themselves with no oversight, can do just that. The documentary makes a compelling case that a semi-autonomous Tesla killed a young stargazer outside Key West, Florida, because its driver was so overconfident in the car’s capabilities that he took his eyes off the road. (Last year, a Florida jury agreed, ordering the company to pay $243 million in damages.) And we hear, for the first time, the audio of a Musk lieutenant pressuring Ashley St. Clair, a former right-wing influencer who has a son with Musk, to sign a nondisclosure agreement. (She doesn’t.) It’s a chilling taste of the bloodless tactics with which Musk conducts his love life. Anyone who’s closely watched Musk (or read Businessweek for a few years) may find this sort of thing a bit familiar, but it’ll be new to the average moviegoer. And the film’s production and distribution matter. With financiers including Laurene Powell Jobs’ Anonymous Content, Musk looks expensive. It’s propelled by a driving score from Daniel Pemberton, an Oscar-nominated composer, plus an original song cowritten and performed by David Byrne. It’ll eventually air in the US on HBO, which won a bidding war with Netflix Inc. for streaming rights, and Universal Pictures paid millions more for the right to distribute it elsewhere. “It’s going to be great packaging for the average citizen who doesn’t know this stuff,” says Joel Lava, a Los Angeles activist who’s part of the Tesla Takedown protest movement. He organized an event to coincide with the movie’s release in addition to his twice-weekly protests in front of Musk properties. Musk is one of several well-funded fall releases marketed as some sort of tech-industry takedown, including Artificial (about the risks posed by OpenAI and its peers), The Social Reckoning (about the risks posed by social media) and You Can See Everything (about Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes). In the run-up to Musk’s premiere, there were signs that its subject might be taking a page from William Randolph Hearst, who famously interfered with the release of the Hearst-inspired drama Citizen Kane. Musk and his surrogates, including former White House staffer Katie Miller, attacked the film repeatedly on Musk’s social media platform. (In one exchange between the two of them, Miller called the film “a hit job by a self-obsessed Hollywood director,” to which Musk replied, “Exactly.”) And Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro threatened to sue over an exchange in which St. Clair alleges that Musk had bragged about manipulating the 2024 election. In September, the Hollywood Reporter wrote that Universal— perhaps mindful of the pressure or worried about the commercial appeal of a four-hour documentary—was considering declining to distribute the movie, and that the four big social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube) all rejected ads for Musk in the weeks that followed. Gibney says that he was worried, and assumes pressure from Musk and his allies played a role, but that Universal acted quickly to reassure him after the Hollywood Reporter story. “They’re leaning in,” he says. Meanwhile, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube reversed their decisions, saying they’d made an unspecified mistake. (TikTok is still refusing to distribute ads on the grounds that the film is political. Musk’s X also refused, for obvious reasons.) The reversal may have been prompted by embarrassment, or it might be because the companies looked at the polls. Musk was already a controversial figure in early 2024 following his takeover of Twitter and his decision to reinstate President Trump and a host of far-right accounts, but he was still a popular figure. Recent polls now show Musk’s net favorable (the share of people who view him positively minus the share who view him negatively) at somewhere between –7% and –20%. That makes him only slightly better liked than Trump, whose unpopularity may cost Republicans one or both houses of Congress in November. If that happens, Musk and his close allies will almost certainly be targets of congressional inquiries. In the case of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, criminal prosecutions could well be on the table. Billions of dollars in federal contracts that SpaceX has outstanding could be at risk too. “This should be a litmus test for any Democratic presidential hopeful: Will you pay Elon Musk?” says Max Rose, a moderate Democrat and former US representative from Staten Island, who has been urging colleagues to explore ways to cut off Musk’s government contracts. Musk is doing his part to head off a potential blue wave, having contributed (personally and via his super PAC) well over $300 million to Trump-aligned causes and candidates since 2024, according to federal filings and a New York Times report. He could spend even more backing Republican House and Senate candidates before Election Day. Notably, though, he’s staying out of the spotlight in those races, perhaps because the candidates he’s supporting would rather not associate with the world’s first trillionaire. That puts Musk in a position he’s rarely found himself in: a bystander in a drama rather than the center of attention. Remarks
In Context
In View
Women’s Sports
Pursuits
CEO Diet
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