Like him or not, Elon Musk is one of those generational change-makers who define the world in which we live, for better or worse. That demands public scrutiny, not least in a moment wherein the 51-year-old tech mogul has sought to irrevocably shift digital society with his controversial $44 billion acquisition of Twitter — and what better form can that take than a warts 'n all film profile from an Oscar-winning documentarian?
That's precisely what we're getting, reports Variety, with Musk set to be the subject of a new documentary film from Alex Gibney, the unflinching maker of Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. That's right: from one questionable cultish figure to another, Gibney is making what has been described as a "definitive and unvarnished examination of [the] multi-billionaire tech entrepreneur and CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter," a project he is “hugely excited” by.
Bolstered by a loyal following of Elonites across social media, Musk has been accused of autocratic behaviour by employees since he took over Twitter in late 2022, dishing out firings and overhauls aplenty. It was recently reported by the BBC that Musk has hired bodyguards to accompany him in the Twitter offices, even accompanying him to the bathroom, which might be read as telling in itself.
One anonymous engineer told the news site that while Twitter might look damaged-but-functional from the exterior, “for someone on the inside, it's like a building where all the pieces are on fire.” Since Musk's purchase of Twitter, the BBC reports, at least half of the workforce has either been sacked or chosen to leave, with team members having to shift focus away from safety measures against trolling, for example. “A totally new person, without the expertise, is doing what used to be done by more than 20 people,” the same engineer told the BBC. “That leaves room for much more risk, more possibilities of things that can go wrong.”
Aside from trolling, on a purely technical level, Twitter users have noticed breakdowns and outages over the past months, reportedly also a product of the platform's intensive workload being shouldered by fewer staff. According to a New York Times report at the end of February, Twitter now has fewer than 2,000 employees compared to 7,500 at the time of Elon Musk's takeover, with the latest round of cuts affecting “dozens of engineers responsible for keeping the site online," per the Times' internal sources.
So yeah, suffice to say, a better time for a reveal-all doco there's rarely been.
