Hollywood Takes On the Tech Titans, and the Titans Fight Back
Alex Gibney's Musk opens across America despite Elon Musk's insults and legal threats, as Sorkin's Zuckerberg sequel flops and Amazon drops its OpenAI film.
Update — 19 October 2026: TikTok restored the promotional account for Alex Gibney’s Musk on Sunday, 18 October, after suspending it on Friday, 16 October. A TikTok spokesperson attributed the suspension to an error, and a source close to the production confirmed the account’s restoration to Deadline. The original analysis below was published before the account’s suspension and subsequent restoration.
On Friday Alex Gibney’s Musk opens in cinemas across America, and its subject has been fighting it all the way. Elon Musk has called Gibney an “idiot”, a “horrible human” and a “tinfoil hat crackpot” with “zero credibility”. His lawyer has put the film-makers “on formal legal notice”. And when the film went looking for paid advertising, YouTube, Meta, TikTok and X all refused it, the Associated Press reported. YouTube and Meta later backed down, saying the film had been flagged for “political content”.
The four-hour documentary premiered in Venice last month, and on Tuesday it collected five Critics Choice Documentary Award nominations. It is the boldest shot yet in Hollywood’s revolt against the tech moguls who have bought its studios, its streaming services and the platforms that sell its films.
A Musk Made by Machine
Musk refused to sit for an interview, so Gibney built one. A computer-generated Musk in the trademark black leather jacket talks to the camera, speaking only words the real man has said in public, with AI matching them to his lips. A digital double suits a man who believes we may live in a simulation, and Gibney calls the device “thematically appropriate and formally playful”.
Follow the ownership and the plot thickens. X belongs to Musk, whose purchase of Twitter in 2022 was backed by $1 billion from Larry Ellison. Ellison’s Oracle owns 15 per cent of TikTok’s American venture. Meta belongs to Mark Zuckerberg, whom Hollywood has just put in the dock in another film. And HBO, which bought the rights to stream Musk in 2023, has belonged since 6 October to Larry’s son, David Ellison. Gibney has asked the obvious question out loud: “Would Musk be able to call Larry or David and say, you know, don’t put this doc on? Yeah.”
Why Good People Do Bad Things
Gibney has spent more than two decades filming what power does to people, from the Enron traders to the Catholic Church. When I met him in Los Angeles in 2018, he told me that power had let his subjects sin on a bigger and bolder scale, because it made them feel entitled to. “I think there is no philosophy more dangerous than the end justifies the means,” he said. He also scolded his fellow Americans for dividing the world into good people and bad people, when most are a mixture of both.
That is the trap he sets in Musk. For its first 45 minutes, he says, viewers find themselves “kind of rooting for Elon”. Then the film follows him from rockets and electric cars to Donald Trump’s side and his cost-cutting raid on the federal government.
The tech titans have bitten back before. In 2015 Gibney’s Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine provoked Apple’s Eddy Cue into calling it “an inaccurate and mean-spirited view of my friend”. The same year Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs opened to a feeble $7.3 million, and Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, dismissed it as “opportunistic”.
Sorkin Strikes Out Again
Sorkin has now struck out a second time. The Social Reckoning, with Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg and Mikey Madison as the whistleblower Frances Haugen, took about $5.3 million in North America and $8.8 million worldwide on its opening weekend, against a reported budget of $30 million to $40 million. Audiences gave it a B-minus. Even the original Zuckerberg stayed away. “It turns out Jesse Eisenberg no longer wants to be conflated with Mark Zuckerberg,” Sorkin said. Meta declined to comment.
In 2011 The Social Network swept the Golden Globes, winning best drama, director, screenplay and score, when Facebook still looked like a dorm-room adventure. Today’s audiences live inside the algorithm the sequel sets out to explain, and they have no appetite for paying to hear about it.
The Owners Strike Back
The new owners have weapons the old ones never had. In June, Amazon MGM Studios dropped Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s film about OpenAI, with Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, months after Amazon agreed to invest $50 billion in OpenAI. Amazon said the film would “be better served if it were released by a different studio”. Neon took it, and it premiered at the New York Film Festival on 5 October, with Ike Barinholtz as Musk. Guadagnino says the film is about the tech oligarchy’s “truly radical control” over “the very identity of places like the United States and the entire world”.
Hollywood’s old moguls never pretended to be champions of free speech. After the Sony hack, when Hollywood backed away from North Korea over The Interview, a studio chairman told me: “Hollywood is not about that; it’s a business.” At least those moguls only sold tickets. The new ones own the studios, the streaming services, the platforms that sell the advertising and the algorithms that decide what we see. Hollywood can still make films about them. They decide who gets to watch.
More on UKScreen
Most read on UKScreen
Get the best of UKScreen by email
New stories, reviews and interviews from the archive, straight to your inbox.
1 Comment
Comments are closed.