Hero of Capitalism
Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary about Elon Musk was eagerly awaited on the Lido. Gibney, aged 72, is a legendary documentary filmmaker who has won numerous awards, including an Oscar for his film *Taxi to the Dark Side* (2007), which reconstructs the torture and murder of a taxi driver at the US military base in Bagram, Afghanistan.
It comes as no surprise that Elon Musk was unwilling to grant him an interview. Instead, Gibney sifts through all the material available on the man whom the English critic Peter Bradshaw has described as "the world’s richest and dullest man: the overgrown brattish South-African-born trillionaire plutocrat, ersatz visionary and Trump courtier“.
Gibney interviewed Musk’s former business partners, but the most revealing information comes from his first wife, Justine Musk, and the former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair, with whom Musk has a child. As one might expect, the picture that emerges is far from flattering for the man who has amassed a vast fortune through Tesla cars, SpaceX rockets and Starlink satellites, and who bought the news platform Twitter for billions.
The film convincingly debunks the frequently evoked image of ‘the world’s most successful capitalist’, as Donald Trump referred to him at an election rally. Musk’s success lies primarily in the realm of media self-promotion. He has been shown the door on several occasions from companies such as Zip2 and PayPal, each time receiving severance packages worth millions.
How Musk came by his enormous fortune is a question that even the film cannot fully answer. For a long time, he was regarded as an eco-visionary thanks to his electric Tesla cars and reusable SpaceX rockets. His companies received generous subsidies from the Obama administration and the State of California. The same was true in Germany during the construction of the so-called Giga-Factory in Grünheide, Brandenburg. One recalls the enthusiasm shown by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the Green Party’s Minister for Economic Affairs, Robert Habeck, at the handover of the first Tesla Y model in March 2022. The fact that, as is the case everywhere, trade unions are not permitted in Musk’s companies was deemed a small price to pay for such a high level of technological innovation.
By 2024, the going had got pretty rough for Musk, with dozens of government proceedings pending that would have spelled the economic end for the capitalist prodigy. Gibney illustrates this very well in a sequence in which Musk extols how easy it is to swap batteries in Tesla cars. A publicity stunt with no basis in reality. The same applies to supposedly safe autonomous driving systems, which have caused dozens of fatal accidents.
To save his skin, Musk became an unconditional Trump supporter in 2024, backing his election campaign with more than 300 million dollars. Following Trump’s re-election, as head of Doge (Department of Government Efficiency), he promised to cut government spending by millions. The opposite turned out to be the case. Tax revenues fell because Musk’s cut-backs also led to the mass redundancy of tax authority staff.
Gibney’s documentary thoroughly debunks the myths and self-promotion with which Musk likes to present himself as a self-made man and business genius. We are witnessing a pathologically narcissistic personality who lives in a world of video games and chases infantile dreams. It comes as no surprise that Elon Musk describes Alex Gibney as a ‘bitter old man’ who has made a film consisting of ‘four hours of boredom’, and is threatening to sue his production company.
Victims of Stalinism
“DAU” is a monumental project by the Ukrainian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, conceived in 2005 and filmed since 2008 on a vast site in Kharkiv. It was the largest film set in Europe, an immersive total work of art aimed at depicting life in the Stalinist Soviet Union with the utmost authenticity. More than a dozen films have emerged from the project, three of which have been shown to the public to date. Chržanovskij explained that his aim was to evoke the period between 1928 and 1968. With enormous effort, historical details, cars, clothing, architecture and food were faithfully reconstructed. Six years ago, *DAU. Natasha* was presented at the Berlinale, where it won an award for outstanding artistic achievement.
At the heart of the new “DAU” film – which, at 195 minutes, demands a fair amount of patience from viewers – is the brilliant physicist Dau, a character inspired by the internationally renowned Russian physicist Lev Landau, commonly known as Dau, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.
“Spanning over four decades of upheaval, DAU is both an intimate portrait of a man and a monumental fresco of a society shaped by violence and ideology,” according to Khrzhanovsky's description.
The theoretical physicists live in a hermetically sealed institute and are under pressure from the state to focus on military research. Anyone who refuses must face brutal consequences. This is also the case for Dau, who ends up in prison during the Stalinist purges. Later, he and his colleagues are forced to work on the construction of the Soviet atomic bomb. We do not see much of this, but all the more of Dau’s erotic adventures, which he indulges in excessively as a proponent of the idea of free love.
Through precise details and long takes, “DAU” paints a panorama of Soviet society during the Stalinist era. The street scenes, shot in Kharkiv, are striking for their documentary-like quality, whilst we are simultaneously aware that they are entirely fictional.
When the film was invited to compete at the Venice Film Festival, the Ukrainian Ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs protested. They claimed that “DAU” had been financed by the Russian oligarch Sergei Adonev and was characterised by a pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian attitude.
Furthermore, the physicist Dau is played by the Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis, a star of the international music scene. As he took Russian citizenship in 2014 and has not publicly condemned the invasion of Ukraine, he is often vilified in the German and Ukrainian media as a Putin supporter.
Festival director Alberto Barbera firmly rejected the criticism. He stated that “DAU” is a German-French-Swedish production, not a Russian film and not pro-Russian propaganda. The director, lya Khrzhanovsky, has repeatedly spoken out clearly against Russia’s war of aggression. Furthermore, he argued, a film is being criticised that no one has yet seen in public. Screening it in Venice is an expression of freedom of expression.