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Alex Gibney’s new four-hour documentary, “Musk,” is unlike any I’ve seen.

The film combines incisive and poignant interviews about the tech lord man-baby with video-game-style sequences and an uncanny Valley-esque CGI avatar of Elon Musk uttering his own words in a stilted AI voice. (Musk has often mused that we are living in a simulation run by a more advanced civilization, so that’s on point.)

There are also of course, countless clips of the real Musk, now 55, a man who, as one of his many detractors in the film puts it, “is a skilled inventor of his own value.”

“Few people promote themselves as egregiously as Musk,” says tech writer Kara Swisher, a onetime admirer and current antagonist of Musk.

I will leave it to the critics to weigh the artistic merits of Gibney’s stylistic choices — I personally did not love the sequences where a ray-gun-wielding hand bursts through the doors of many federal agencies (POV: Musk), vaporizing workers while a meter ticks up the kills. It is, however, an apt metaphor for the violence Musk’s callow Department of Government Efficiency team inflicted on thousands of civil servants in the brutal period after President Trump’s second inauguration.

Overall, I found the film fascinating, scary, infuriating and not the least bit reassuring about Musk, his ethics or our future. Will Musk eventually use the expansive files his DOGE minions improperly downloaded to train his incipient XAI venture? No one knows.

I’ve long believed that money and power infantilize. Few men embody that notion more fully than Musk, who is petty to the point of absurdity. During the 2023 Super Bowl, for example, he was irked that President Biden’s tweets about the Philadelphia Eagles got more engagement than his, so Musk flew to San Francisco and ordered his team to change the platform’s algorithm to artificially boost the visibility of his own posts.

This from a man who claims to have purchased Twitter in the name of free speech.

Gibney’s film does a good job of explaining Musk’s rise: He is a good but not great engineer, a terrible manager with a genius for self-promotion and exaggeration, particularly when it comes to, say, the highly questionable “autopilot” ability of Teslas, which has been the subject of numerous lawsuits........

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