Alex Gibney did not set out to make a Marxist film. The Oscar-winning director of documentaries on Enron and Scientology says his nearly four-hour portrait of Elon Musk is about something narrower: the corrupting effect of unaccountable power. But listen closely to how Gibney describes his own project, and a more specific political architecture comes into view — one built less on personal character flaws than on the argument that private wealth, once concentrated past a certain point, becomes a public danger that citizens must collectively reclaim.
That argument has a long intellectual pedigree, and it is not a libertarian one.
Speaking to reporters at the Toronto International Film Festival, Gibney said he hoped the film would push viewers to "take back power from these tech oligarchs" who he believes are running the world for themselves. It is a striking phrase for a documentary that markets itself as journalism rather than manifesto. Gibney is not simply arguing that Musk broke rules, misled investors, or abused government access — claims the film does make and which are, in principle, falsifiable. He is arguing that power itself, once it accumulates in one set of private hands, belongs collectively to "citizens of the world" and ought to be taken back.
That is not a complaint about a company. It is a claim about ownership.
Karl Marx's account of capitalism, as summarized in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, treats the relentless accumulation of capital as the defining engine of the system — a process that concentrates control of productive assets in fewer hands while everyone else supplies labor. Gibney's film follows almost exactly that arc: Musk's rise from the dot-com era through Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/X, and finally to the position of the world's richest man, culminating not in an account of what was built but in a warning about what has been amassed.
That is the crucial choice a filmmaker makes. A biography of an entrepreneur can end with the products: reusable rockets, an electric-car industry that did not meaningfully exist twenty years ago, a satellite internet network reaching remote regions of the planet. Gibney's film instead ends with the ledger of power. The emphasis itself is an argument, and it is one anti-capitalist thinkers have been making since the nineteenth century: the interesting story about a rich man is not what he made, but what he now controls.
The word "oligarch" is not exclusively a term of the left. Conservatives and classical liberals use it too, usually to describe cronyism — wealth acquired through political favoritism rather than open competition. But Gibney's prescription is not narrower antitrust enforcement or campaign-finance reform. It is collective: ordinary citizens, he says, need to "take back" what has been taken from them. That framing treats Musk's fortune and influence as something that rightly belongs to the public and has been diverted from it, which is a materially different claim from saying he broke specific laws or deceived specific regulators.
To Gibney's credit, the film stops well short of calling for nationalization or the abolition of private enterprise. His stated concern, reported by Reuters, is that tech executives are disregarding federal oversight and accumulating influence that erodes democratic accountability — a critique of insufficient regulation, not of markets as such. That distinction matters. Social-democratic arguments for taming concentrated capital through regulation and transparency are a different tradition from Marxist arguments for replacing capitalism outright, and conflating the two would overstate what the film actually argues.
Even so, the underlying premise remains: private economic power is inherently suspect, and the remedy runs through collective political action rather than competitive markets, consumer choice, or voluntary exchange. That is a coherent position. It is also, unmistakably, a position — not a neutral biographical fact about Elon Musk.
The clearest expression of that worldview came not in the film itself but in the Q&A that followed its Toronto premiere. An audience member asked Gibney whether he would rather live in a world without Musk's accomplishments. According to reporting on the exchange, Gibney laughed and said he questioned the phrase "the accomplishments of Elon Musk" altogether, pointing out that Tesla was founded by other engineers and that SpaceX, too, drew on the work of many people. The audience applauded.
That is a genuinely interesting rhetorical move, and it deserves to be examined rather than simply cheered or jeered. It is true that Musk did not personally invent battery chemistry or write every line of flight-control software. It is also true that identifying capital, risk tolerance, and organizational leadership as economically valueless — reducible entirely to the labor of engineers — is precisely the move classical economics rejects and Marxist labor theory embraces. Someone has to decide which bets get funded, which failures get absorbed, and which teams get assembled and held together for a decade of losses before a rocket successfully lands. Denying that this function is itself a contribution, worth compensating, is not a neutral fact-check. It is an argument about who deserves credit for an achievement — and it was delivered to an approving room.
The reception at the film's Venice premiere reinforces the point. Accounts differ on the exact length — the Hollywood Reporter recorded a five-minute standing ovation inside the Sala Grande, while Variety put it at four — but both agree that an exhausted festival crowd, after sitting through 225 minutes plus an intermission, chose to stand and applaud rather than head for the exits. That is real evidence of enthusiastic agreement with the film's thesis among an elite festival audience. It is not evidence of envy, resentment, or any particular psychological motive on the part of individual viewers, and a serious account of the reaction should not pretend otherwise. What it does show is an appetite, at least among that audience, for a narrative in which concentrated private success is treated primarily as a problem for democracy to solve.
None of this means Gibney has made a communist film, and it would be inaccurate reporting to claim he had. His public statements do not call for state ownership of Tesla or SpaceX, and the documentary's factual claims about regulatory access, stock promotion, and political influence are separate matters that can and should be evaluated on their own evidence. But a free-market reading of the film's reception has to reckon honestly with what is actually happening: a work of nonfiction cinema built around the premise that accumulated private power is illegitimate until proven otherwise, applauded by audiences for dismissing the very idea of individual entrepreneurial achievement, is not simply "criticism of one billionaire." It is a specific and coherent political argument, borrowing its structure — if not its final destination — from a much older critique of capital itself. Readers evaluating "Musk" this autumn deserve to know that going in.