Sept. 11, 2026
🎥 Elon Wages Online War Against Film About His Life
1. Oscar-winning documentary director Alex Gibney finally premiered his Elon Muskdocumentary, Musk, this week at the Venice Film Festival, and the richest man in the world isn’t happy about it. The premiere was followed by a 48-second teaser clip on YouTube that features a montage of SpaceX footage as voices comment on Musk, calling him everything from “the greatest capitalist in the world” to “manifestly cruel and selfish.”
When Gibney first announced the film in 2023, Musk hopped on Twitter (just before he bought it) and wrote, “Gibney is a douche.” That seemed like it might be the end of his commentary on the project, but the film is still on Musk’s radar in a very big way. Just before the film’s premiere, Musk wrote, “Alex Gibney is obviously going to make the most convincingly terrible hit piece on me that he can possibly think of. He’s a douchebag to his core and, in his own words, incredibly biased against me.” Then, around the time the teaser video dropped, Musk went on a multi-post Twitter/X rant, saying, “Gibney has zero integrity. Zero. Fortunately, his movies are boring af,” “It’s a hit piece that misses, and makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours,” “[Gibney is] a bitter old man who lost the plot long ago,” and “Gibney just assembled a hit list of people who either have an axe to grind or don’t even know me (but still have an axe to grind). He has ZERO integrity. Horrible human.”
Musk’s social media anger simmered and boiled over into the following day, when he said, “Gibney deliberately set out to make a hit piece and lacks any integrity whatsoever.” Soon after, reports surfaced that Musk’s attorney had sent Gibney’s production company, Jigsaw Productions, a letter threatening legal action related to claims made in the film.
Meanwhile, Gibney, who has also directed impactful documentaries on imprisoned Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, the collapse of Enron, and the critics of Scientology, seemed unbothered by drawing the ire of the first trillionaire.
“I don’t really care what he thinks. I didn’t make it for him,” Gibney said in an interview this week with AP. “Musk is an avowed free speech absolutist. But it’s clear that when speech is critical of him, he’s not so much of an absolutist.” In another interview, Gibney explained how difficult producing the film was. “I think the thing that struck me most was particularly early on, when I was trying to get people to talk, there was a tremendous sense of fear of talking,” Gibney said at his Venice Film Festival press conference. “Really almost existential fear, both among people who were his critics, people who were his business colleagues, and people who were his friends.”
AI Exceptionalism: Interestingly, the documentary uses AI to simulate Musk’s voice to repeat real quotes from the tech mogul. AI is also used to deliver an avatar of Musk in the film. What will be interesting to see is the reaction from the anti-AI crowd—which often intersects with the anti-Musk cohort—to the use of AI to roast one of their favorite targets. So far, there hasn’t been much outcry about the AI simulation of Musk.
But would the vocal opposition be louder if a documentary were produced about widely admired figures like actor Tom Hanks or Apple’s Tim Cook in which AI avatars were used to depict them in unflattering ways in the film? Will using AI in service of skewering a supposed enemy of some in Hollywood, in this case, Musk, be deemed acceptable as a cinematic tool? We’ll know in a few weeks, as the film is set to hit theaters in the U.S. on October 16.
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🧟♂️ Danny Boyle Joins AI Zombie Horde
2. “My opinion of [AI] is that it’s a very useful tool, in many ways, provided you use it respectfully. And provided you pay actors if you’re gonna replace them with some kind of AI embodiment… There’s about 30 seconds of [AI] in our movie [Ink]. We animate a couple of old photographs.”
—Danny Boyle, director, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire
*Source: Vanity Fair
🎬 Former Disney Master Launches AI Video Studio
3. The AI video generation development that began at OpenAI, but was unceremoniously canceled before Disney could utilize Sora, is finding new life. OpenAI’s former Sora lead, Bill Peebles, is teaming up with Hollywood heavyweight Jeffrey Katzenberg to launch a new startup that will focus on delivering AI video models to major movie studios. For those rusty on their Hollywood lore, Katzenberg ran Disney’s film unit from the 1980s to early ‘90s, and was part of the founding team that launched DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, producing hits like Saving Private Ryan and the Shrek animation franchise.
Of course, no Katzenberg story would be complete without mentioning one of his biggest misses: the launch of short-form video company Quibi. Around the same time, Katzenberg founded a venture capital firm called WndrCo with Silicon Valley veteran Sujay Jaswa, who is also a part of the launch of the new AI video project, according to The Information. Katzenberg’s past Hollywood pedigree is no guarantee of success (see Quibi), but the move does point to the fact that more Hollywood studios will likely soon be using AI models for video generation, whether the technology’s naysayers like it or not. ✍︎
🎭 Director: Black Actors Not Needed, AI Instead
4. “We sent [the script] out to actors, and no Black actors wanted to play in a movie where there are no good Black people. And it sort of died. But then AI came along, and I didn’t need Black actors. We’re making them!”
—Paul Schrader, director, American Gigolo, Cat People
*Source: The Playlist” ✍︎
MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.
Cover image: Photo collage of scenes from the ‘Musk’ documentary via Bleecker Street
