Five things you need to know about the new four-hour Elon Musk documentary

The Venice Film Festival has hosted the premiere of major documentary-maker Alex Gibney's epic and provocative new profile of the richest man on Earth, which has been years in the making. Here are five key takeaways from the film.

Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning director of Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, has made documentaries about some of the richest and most powerful people on Earth. But none of them has been as rich and powerful as Elon Musk. Maybe that's why Gibney's profile of the tech entrepreneur and SpaceX boss is such an epic. Musk, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, has a running time of 225 minutes, and will be released with a 10-minute intermission – so that's almost four hours on the life and work of the world's richest man.

Still, the time rockets by. There is little in the film that isn't already on record, but Gibney gathers all the extant reporting into one breathlessly fast-moving, largely negative, and terrifyingly apocalyptic profile. Here are five things you should know about the documentary – just in case you don't have four hours to spare.

1. Musk himself isn't interviewed – but appears as an AI avatar

Gibney initially tried for an interview with Musk, but when the project was announced back in March 2023, Musk declared on social media that it would be a "hit piece", to which Gibney responded, "How would you know?" The director's solution is to have an AI-generated avatar of Musk repeat things that he has said in public. This is apt, says Gibney in his voiceover, because Musk believes that we might all be living in a simulation – a video game being played by our descendants in the future.

2. David Byrne helped write a theme song

David Byrne has co-written Let Me Sell You a Dream for the film's closing credits, which has lyrics consisting entirely of phrases spoken by Musk in the past. The title is appropriate, according to some of Gibney's interviewees, who say that Musk tends to attract investment by promising that imagined future accomplishments – such as cities on Mars and completely safe self-driving cars – are imminent or already realised. "That's not happening," says Adam........

© BBC