The revelation comes after the four-hour film’s Venice premiere drew a string of criticisms and insults from the founder of SpaceXAI

Alex Gibney, director of the new four-hour documentary about Elon Musk, said that Universal, owners of the film’s international distribution rights “wavered” over releasing the film outside North America.

Gibney was speaking to the New York Times as the film opened in the US (where it is being released by the independent distributor Bleecker Street), and appeared to confirm a story in the Hollywood Reporter that Universal, which had acquired the international rights to the film in 2023, had got cold feet. Asked by the New York Times, “Did Universal Pictures waver in setting up its international release plans?” Gibney replied: “Yes.”

Elon Musk is a very familiar figure to Ars readers, given his massive influence (for better and worse) on the technology sector over the last 20 years. Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney's latest biographical documentary—simply titled Musk—covers a lot of well-known ground and challenges the carefully crafted public image of Musk as a visionary tech titan.

Gibney's documentary presents Musk as more of a Gilded Age confidence man, rejiggered for the 21st century: an investor cosplaying as an inventor whose real genius is pumping stocks and dazzling investors and the public alike with visions of a high-tech utopian future. The film is bound to push all the right outrage buttons, whether one is a Musk fan or a detractor—which makes it very much a product of the peculiar social media-driven era in which we live.

Gibney has been making documentaries since the 1980s, covering such varied subjects as Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism, WikiLeaks, Scientology, Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes (the subject of another forthcoming documentary, You Can See Everything, featuring comedian Nathan Fielder), Boris Becker, The Sopranos creator David Chase, alleged Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election, the opioid epidemic, and cyclist Lance Armstrong. He snagged his first Oscar nomination for 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature two years later for Taxi to the Dark Side.

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