“Megalomaniac With A God Complex”: Brutal Musk Doc Reviews

John Johnston (0:00)

Elon is a nuke. Well, one of the things she could mean by that is that he is dangerous on a global scale. There may be none scarier than the implication by Ashley Sinclair, who's the mother of one of his numerous children. Elon Musk may have used his Starlink internet network to rig the 2024 US presidential election.

Hi everyone, JJ here. Welcome back to The Lounge. Well, more reviews are in of the Musk documentary from Oscar-winning filmmaker, Alex Gibney, and they are brutal. So it's been shown at the Venice Film Festival and now the Toronto Film Festival in the weekend. This one here from The Washington Post. Musk film is almost four hours long, engrossing and terrifying. Apparently, there's an intermission during it, and maybe when they come to stream it on HBO, they'll break it into more episodes. I don't know what to know about it. They say the documentary paints the tech titan as a power hungry, megalomaniac con man with a god complex. Musk accuses the filmmaker of compiling a hit list against him. So we've seen that in previous episodes. I'm making a series about this. We've seen what Elon has to say. He does not like it. He does not like Alex Gibney. He did not want to participate in this, but they put him in an AI generated form, which does fit, because Elon thinks we're living in a simulation or a high chance that we're living in a simulation. And you can see how he might think that and everybody else is an NPC and he is the main character. And this one too, this is from The Daily Beast. This is the scariest revelation from bombshell Elon Musk documentary. So before we get back to the other one, let's see what they say here. Touch of the chase, so to speak. Yet of all the revelations in the prolific director's latest, there may be none scarier than the implication by right-wing influencer Ashley Sinclair, who's the mother of one of his numerous children. Yesterday's episode was going in depth into an interview with her. She's saying a lot about this. Elon Musk may have used his Starlink internet network to rig the 2024 US presidential election.

Oh, and that those 10,000-plus satellites are outfitted with space lasers, meaning that, if true, he's a real-life Lex Luthor with the resources to remake the world in his mad image. Elon, through his high-profile lawyer, is threatening to sue over this, so more on that later, I'm sure. Let's get back to this Washington Post review.

Yes, it's long. It earns the runtime, if you're wondering about that four-hour documentary length. It goes into great detail. Apparently, they added to it in real-time because stuff was happening in real-time as they were making it, so they got more funding to make more. It was six hours and they cut it down to four. I mean, we're used to seeing that just broken down into hour-long episodes, right, on streaming, so maybe they will do that, I don't know. But for the screening, that intermission, 10-minute intermission, they say, if I hadn't looked at the clock, I might have guessed that only two hours had passed. It's deeply comprehensive, beginning with Musk co-founding Zip2 in 1995 and running through the Department of Defense's embrace of GROK earlier this summer. So there's a few headings here. I'm going to run through them. I'm not going to read the whole review out. An AI-generated Musk in a video game motif. The movie begins with Musk discussing simulation theory, the idea that we're all actually living in a computer simulation. I mean, he really does think that, or at least he says he does. He said it on many occasions.

To explain why he believes this could be true, he points to the rapid advancement of video games from Pong to hyper-realistic, dynamic, massively multiplayer, online role-playing games that thousands of people around the world play simultaneously. If we can make that leap in 50 years, he reasons, how could we not have already reached a point of creating a true simulation of life? So we're in a simulation, maybe an alien species has created a video game and we're being simulated, simulated universes, perhaps. As I said, you can see how he might think that being the richest person in the world and everybody else can seem like a non-playing character. Musk's private, oh, so private life, the next heading, the most emotionally fraught aspects of the film come during interviews with Musk's former romantic partners.

His first wife, Justine Musk, with whom he had six children, said she learned the term gaslighting through the relationship. Now, if you don't know what gaslighting means, I recommend that you watch an old movie under that name. Gaslighter, I think it's called, if you don't know that, if you don't know where that term comes from.