Alex Gibney says Elon Musk should ’embrace free speech’ as billionaire blasts documentary

TORONTO – The filmmaker behind a new documentary on Elon Musk has been taken aback by some of the billionaire’s reaction to his movie. 

Alex Gibney has been criticized by the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla all week, with Musk using his platform X to call the director “a horrible human,” who “lacks integrity” and is a “bitter old man who lost the plot long ago.”

Gibney’s documentary, which is playing at the Toronto International Film Festival, delves into the extreme power Musk has amassed through his trio of companies, and raises questions about what the entrepreneur’s ultimate goal could be. 

“He’s sort of lost his (expletive) and threatened to sue, which is not what I’d expect from a free-speech absolutist, as he calls himself,” Gibney said in an interview ahead of a press screening of the nearly four-hour-long “Musk,” which premieres to the public on Monday. 

“He says in the film free speech is about promoting the speech of people you don’t like, saying things you don’t agree with, in effect. So OK, pull up your big-boy pants and embrace free speech,” Gibney said. 

Musk did not respond to requests for comments sent to Tesla and SpaceX.

Gibney is confident in the critical picture he paints of Musk in the documentary because of just how much work he says went into researching and fact checking.

“Every documentary I do is thoroughly vetted, and this one was even more thoroughly vetted than usual, where we checked our own facts a lot,” said the documentarian who has previously investigated the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and failed entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes.

“We have deep sourcing and multiple sourcing on virtually everything in the film and then we had it checked by independent fact checkers and we had it worked over line by line by a gaggle of lawyers.”

Gibney also says a lot of the material comes from research and voices that aren’t necessarily in the final cut of the documentary. 

“We talked to a lot of people, hundreds of people on background, many of whom declined to speak on the record,” he said.

Among those featured in the film are the Musk’s father, his first wife Justine Musk, and his ex Ashley St. Clair, whom he had a child with. British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who is considered the godfather of artificial intelligence, also makes an appearance, as well as Musk’s previous business partners, and journalists who have followed him closely.

Musk’s recent remarks aren’t the first time he’s blasted Gibney for the film.

Before the documentary was anywhere close to completion, Musk took to X to label it “a hit piece.”

Gibney had replied, “How would you know?”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2026.