Robert De Niro opened with arithmetic, and by the time he got to his question, a roomful of Academy members was laughing at the world’s richest man.
De Niro, the Oscar-winning actor who co-founded the Tribeca Festival with Jane Rosenthal, introduced an intimate showing of Alex Gibney’s documentary “Musk” on Sunday, Nov. 8, 2026, at the Crosby Hotel in Manhattan, and used the introduction to mock Elon Musk’s midterm spending. Rosenthal joined him for the event.
De Niro said, “Elon Musk spent about 300 million dollars getting Trump elected in 2024.” He continued, “And he just spent close to half a billion on Republicans in this past week’s election. How did that turn out for you?” The room answered with cheers and laughter.
“In the fight between Musk’s money and democracy, democracy won. This time. But just like his grotesque Cybertruck, Musk isn’t going anywhere,” he said.
Musk announced on X that Tesla would end production of the Cybertruck next summer, and De Niro worked that news into his remarks alongside the election results. He urged the audience not to treat the repudiation of President Donald Trump at the polls as a finish line, telling them to remain vigilant, be prepared to act and spread the word about the film. Gibney took the microphone after him.
The Medal, Then the Midterms
Musk put around $445 million into Republican-backed political action committees and causes ahead of November’s elections, making him the party’s biggest backer of the midterm cycle. From July to early October alone, he donated $276 million to Republicans.
Democrats swept control of the House, the Senate and several governor’s races in the Nov. 3 midterms. Trump had awarded Musk the National Medal of Science on Oct. 8, less than a month before the vote.
A Musk Built by Computer
Gibney’s film runs three hours 52 minutes, and not a single minute of it shows Musk sitting with the director. He declined to take part. Gibney built an “interview” out of a computer-generated Musk with an AI-synced voice repeating things he has really said elsewhere, a device the director has described as deliberately ironic.
Musk wrote the project off as a hit piece from the beginning, when it started in 2023, and he has stayed on the attack since. He called the finished documentary a “hit piece that misses” in a post on X, and said Gibney has “zero integrity.”
Ashley St. Clair, the former MAGA influencer who had a relationship with Musk and is the mother of his 13th child, appears on camera, as does tech reporter Zoë Schiffer. The film comes down hard on Musk’s time running DOGE for Trump, when hundreds of thousands of federal workers were pushed out.
Where “Melania” Beat “Musk”
The Critics Choice Documentary Awards in New York named “Musk” the year’s best biographical documentary on the same night as the screening. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, and distributor Bleecker Street opened it on four screens.
Its expansion brought in $307,000 across 468 screens, a per-screen average of $649. The “Melania” documentary averaged $4,027 per screen on 1,778 screens. As of Nov. 9, the domestic box office total for “Musk” was reported as over $700,000. The film is now available on demand.
Why the Film Ends on Mars
Gibney frames his subject as a 21st-century reincarnation of the confidence man, and the documentary closes by arguing that Musk has bet everything on artificial intelligence. A review from the Venice premiere reported that the film ends by arguing Musk “has stopped worrying about the technology leading to the extinction of humanity because he has a plan B.”
That plan B is Mars. In the film’s account, it rests on SpaceX’s push to send people to Mars and other planets — a hedge against AI getting out of control that could make money, and that would benefit only the people who can afford it.
Gibney won an Oscar for “Taxi to the Dark Side” and directed “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.”
