Elon Musk’s Four-Hour Documentary Is Here — Why Do We Keep Watching Him When We Say We’re Tired of Him?
Nearly four hours is a strange amount of time to spend with someone the internet keeps insisting it is exhausted by.
Alex Gibney’s new documentary Musk premiered at the Venice Film Festival this week, and its almost four-hour runtime quickly became part of the story. The film examines Elon Musk’s rise, businesses, politics, family relationships and unusually large influence over public life. Musk declined to participate. Gibney built the film instead from archival material, reporting and interviews with people who have known or covered him.
But look at the reaction online and something funny happens. People say, in various forms, four hours of Elon Musk? Absolutely not. Then, surprisingly often, the sentence keeps going: …but I’ll probably watch it.
That contradiction may be more interesting than another argument about whether Musk is brilliant, dangerous, misunderstood or overrated.
You do not have to like someone for them to occupy too much of your life.
Four hours is part of the story
Gibney is not presenting Musk as neutral biography. The documentary is openly critical, and early reviews have described it in similarly severe terms. Musk previously dismissed the project as a “hit piece” and did not sit for an interview. Those positions matter because they tell readers what kind of film this is: a contested portrait of a person who has become difficult to separate from the companies, political arguments and online conversations around him.
Still, the runtime itself became a small cultural referendum.
On Reddit, one highly active discussion of a review drew thousands of votes. Some commenters said four hours was too much. Others admitted that they did not particularly want to watch the documentary but probably would. One person joked that five or six one-hour episodes might somehow feel easier to binge than one four-hour film.
That is not evidence about Musk. Reddit is useful here only for something narrower: it shows the tension in the audience.
We say we have had enough, and then we look again.
“I’m tired of him” is not the same as looking away
Attention does not require admiration.
Sometimes the people we dislike become easier to follow than the people we respect. They surprise us. They irritate us. We want to see what they said next, whether they crossed another line, whether our opinion will be confirmed, or whether everyone else finally sees what we see.
Musk is unusually good at sitting in the middle of that kind of attention because he is attached to so many different things at once: Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, X, artificial intelligence, politics, wealth, family controversy and internet culture. A person can stop caring about one part of the story and still encounter him through another.
That does not mean everyone watching is trapped in some mysterious psychological spell. Sometimes a powerful person is simply newsworthy. Sometimes a documentary is worth seeing because its subject has real influence. Curiosity is not a moral failure.
But there is a difference between choosing to pay attention and discovering that your attention has become automatic.
You know the smaller version of this feeling. You open the account that reliably annoys you. You check the group chat after deciding you are done with the argument. You search a person’s name even though nothing you find ever makes you feel better. You reopen a story because outrage has started to feel unfinished unless you feed it one more update.
The content changes. The loop does not.
Attention is a vote we cast before we notice it
I do not mean that every click is an endorsement. It is not. Watching a documentary about Musk does not mean supporting Musk, just as criticizing someone does not mean secretly admiring them.
But repeated attention is still a relationship with your time.
That matters because time is one of the few resources no billionaire, algorithm or angry stranger can return to you.
Platforms are very good at measuring what keeps us present. They do not need us to feel happy about it. Love, outrage, fear, fascination and disgust can all keep a person on the screen. From the platform’s point of view, a furious ten minutes and a delighted ten minutes are both ten minutes.
So the useful question is not, Does Elon Musk deserve attention? That is too big and too political to be answered by one article.
The more personal question is: how much of my attention did I actually choose today?
Recovery notices the loop before it argues with the content
This is where the story touches recovery for me, but not because Elon Musk needs to be interpreted through a recovery lens. He does not.
The connection is much more ordinary.
Recovery often asks people to notice the moment when an action stops feeling fully chosen and starts feeling automatic. Not only drinking or using, but the smaller routines around a life: where you go, who you call, what you do when the room gets quiet, what you reach for when discomfort arrives.
That kind of noticing can apply to attention too.
You do not have to declare an app evil. You do not have to unfollow every public figure who irritates you. You do not have to become perfectly calm or digitally pure. You can simply notice the loop before entering it again.
Sometimes that means choosing a different way to fill an evening. Our guide to building a sober evening routine is really about that larger idea: empty time feels different when you give it a shape instead of waiting for the strongest impulse to claim it.
And sometimes it is even simpler. Close the tab. Put the phone down. Let a person you dislike be wrong somewhere you are not watching.
Attention is not agreement. But repeated attention still becomes part of your life.
Maybe the four-hour question is really about us
I may watch Gibney’s documentary. Four hours is long, but Musk has enough influence over technology, communications and public debate that understanding the arguments around him can be worthwhile.
What I do not want to do is confuse being informed with being permanently available for the next provocation.
There is a difference.
A documentary ends. A feed does not.
Maybe that is why the runtime has struck such a nerve. Four hours sounds enormous because it makes the cost visible. Social media usually takes the same time from us in pieces so small we barely notice paying.
After four hours of Musk, the most revealing question may not be what you think of Elon Musk.
It may be what kept your eyes there — and whether you meant to give him that much of your day.
Continue the Elon Musk Story
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Sources
Associated Press, September 8, 2026: reporting on the Venice premiere of Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour documentary Musk and Musk’s decision not to participate.
Vanity Fair, September 9, 2026: interview with Alex Gibney about the documentary, its subject and Musk’s public influence.
Reddit discussion snapshots from September 8–9, 2026 are used only to describe audience reaction to the documentary’s runtime and the tension between “Musk fatigue” and continued curiosity. They are not used to establish facts about Musk.
Featured image: Elon Musk speaking at CPAC in 2025. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0. Additional archival images are credited in their captions.