Alex Gibney's Elon Musk Doc: 4-Hour Venice Premiere

July 23, 2026 - Filmmaker Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning documentarian behind such probing portraits of power as Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, is bringing his latest focus to the Lido this fall. The Venice Film Festival has confirmed that Gibney’s as-yet-untitled documentary on Elon Musk will premiere out of competition on the Venice schedule-and audiences should plan accordingly: the film runs nearly four hours.

According to festival organizers, the project has been in the works for several years, tracking Musk’s trajectory from the co-founding of PayPal through the tumultuous acquisition of Twitter (now rebranded X) and the ongoing evolution of SpaceX and Tesla. Neither Gibney nor his production company, Jigsaw Productions, has revealed an exact runtime, but sources close to the cut say editors have shaped a feature that clocks in at approximately 235 minutes. That places it on the far end of nonfiction length, comparable to Gibney’s own Going Clear (119 minutes) or the sprawling Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (128 minutes), let alone the three-and-a-half-hour mark once considered forbidding for documentaries.

The decision to debut at Venice, one of the fall’s most prestige-heavy launching pads, signals that the project is being positioned as a serious, comprehensive work rather than a quick-hit portrait. The festival’s out-of-competition slot allows Gibney to present his film without the pressure of jury prizes, which is often the case for biographical documentaries that aim for scale over narrative convention.

Gibney declined to comment on the film’s length in advance of the premiere, but those familiar with his process say he has been known to insist on long-form storytelling when the subject demands it. His Billions series, a podcast and later a television documentary for Showtime, wrestled with the complexities of wealth and power in modern America, and his Musk film is expected to follow a similar vein-neither hagiography nor hatchet job but an attempt to understand how one man reshaped multiple industries while remaining a polarizing figure.

The documentary draws on extensive archival material and interviews that Gibney conducted over a period stretching from late 2022 through early 2026. Musk himself participated, though the exact nature of his cooperation-whether he had editorial oversight or was simply an on-camera subject-has not been disclosed. The filmmaker has a reputation for maintaining editorial independence even when access is granted, a tension that defined his portraits of Frank Sinatra and Lance Armstrong.

Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera, in a statement released Monday, called the film “a monumental account of a figure who defies easy categorization,” and noted that the festival’s non-competition strand was designed to accommodate works that “demand both attention and patience.” He added that the runtime, while unusual, was “a reflection of the ambition of the project.”

The announcement arrives amid a busy period for Musk-related media. A separate, independently produced documentary on the entrepreneur is also said to be in the works from another filmmaker, though no details on that project have been confirmed. Gibney’s film, however, stands out for its scale and the director’s track record: he has directed more than 20 documentary features, including the recent Zero Days (2016) and The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019), which examined Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

Early reactions to the Venice program were divided on the length question, with some critics privately expressing skepticism about whether any single documentary can sustain nearly four hours on a living subject whose story is still unfolding. Others argue that Gibney’s talent for narrative compression-he has never made a film longer than two and a half hours before-suggests that the extended runtime is a deliberate choice, not a sign of overreach.

The Venice Film Festival runs from August 28 through September 7, 2026. The Musk documentary has not yet secured a distributor or a title, though Gibney has indicated in past interviews that he may not finalize a name until after the festival premiere. A release date beyond Venice has not been announced, but several major streaming services are expected to bid for the rights, given the filmmaker’s profile and the subject’s global notoriety.

For now, the key details remain limited: director Alex Gibney is also credited as the film’s only confirmed cast member, appearing in the capacity of interviewer and narrator, a role he has played in many of his own works. No other participants-whether Musk family members, SpaceX engineers, or Tesla board members-have been officially listed. The documentary’s TMDb rating is not yet available, as is typical for unreleased titles.

As the fall festival season approaches, this Musk documentary promises to be one of the most discussed entries, if only because of its length. Whether that runtime proves justified will be decided on the Lido-and in the reviews that follow.

Source: Hollywood Reporter