Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk movie grew into a six-hour cut after HBO asked for more filming in late 2024. The change turned a two-hour documentary into a much larger project, with the film now being finished for screenings this fall.
Manhattan Editing Suite
Gibney was in a Manhattan editing suite during a thunderstorm when he made small tweaks to the cut, leaning over a line that drew a sharper response from Tony Volante: “Let’s do that ‘power’ quote hotter,” he said, and Volante answered, “Hotter? Yes,”. It is the kind of note that usually disappears in the edit bay; here it signals how much precision the film still needs even after years of reporting.
Late 2024 Reversal
Late 2024 is when the project changed shape. Gibney had already finished a two-hour HBO documentary on Musk, then HBO executives called him and said they wanted more material and would finance more filming. He kept shooting for nearly two additional years, and the film ultimately reached a six-hour cut before being trimmed back down.
That sequence flips the usual documentary timeline. A film that looked done became unfinished again, and the added shooting pushed the story deeper into Musk’s 2025 DOGE era and his SpaceX IPO plate-spin this summer. For viewers, that means the final version is not just a longer assembly; it is the result of a second reporting pass built after HBO saw the first cut.
Gibney’s Longer Reach
Since late 2022, Gibney has been building a Musk film around a subject already tied to SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink, Neuralink, Twitter and PayPal, along with the political and personal material that has made Musk such a volatile on-screen subject. The scope explains why the project expanded so far beyond the original two-hour frame: once the cut went deeper into 2025, the documentary could no longer function as a simple profile.
Gibney has spent his career on subjects including Scientology, Enron, Vladimir Putin, the Catholic Church and Wall Street, so the move to a longer, more combative Musk film fits his pattern of treating power as a running story rather than a sealed chapter. In this case, HBO did not settle for the first pass, and that choice left the movie larger, later and harder to compress.
Fall Screening Window
The film is expected to screen this fall, and that is the practical checkpoint for anyone tracking the project: the cut is now down from six hours, the reporting is done, and the remaining question is how much of that expanded material survives the final version. The unanswered part is simple and useful — what specific new material justified keeping the cameras running for nearly two more years?
