The world’s richest man outspent everyone in the midterms, and a roomful of Academy members laughed at him for it.
Robert De Niro, the Oscar-winning actor who co-founded the Tribeca Festival with Jane Rosenthal, introduced a screening of “Musk” on Sunday, Nov. 8, 2026, at the Crosby Hotel in Manhattan. Rosenthal joined him for the event, an intimate showing of Alex Gibney’s documentary about Elon Musk attended by a roomful of Academy members. De Niro opened with arithmetic.
“Elon Musk spent about 300 million dollars getting Trump elected in 2024,” De Niro said as he introduced the film. “And he just spent close to half a billion on Republicans in this past week’s election. How did that turn out for you?”
Cheers and laughter followed.
Then He Got to the Cybertruck
De Niro had fresher material, too. Musk announced on X that Tesla would end production of the Cybertruck next summer, and the actor worked that into his introduction alongside the election results.
“In the fight between Musk’s money and democracy, democracy won. This time,” De Niro said. He urged the audience not to treat the repudiation of President Donald Trump at the polls as a finish line, saying they had to remain vigilant and be prepared to act, and asked them to spread the word about the film.
Gibney, who won an Oscar for “Taxi to the Dark Side” and directed “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” took the microphone after De Niro’s introduction.
The Biggest GOP Backer Lost Anyway
Ahead of November’s elections, Musk pumped around $445 million into Republican-backed political action committees and causes, making him the party’s biggest backer of the midterm cycle. Between July and early October, he donated $276 million to Republicans. The money did not hold the majorities: Democrats swept control of the House, the Senate and several governor’s races in the Nov. 3 midterms.
Less than a month before the vote, on Oct. 8, Musk received the National Medal of Science from Trump.
The Interview Musk Refused to Give
The film running 3 hours 52 minutes does not contain a single minute of Musk sitting for Gibney. He declined to take part, so the film builds its “interview” from a computer-generated Musk whose AI-synced voice repeats things he has really said elsewhere — a device Gibney has described as deliberately ironic.
Gibney started the project in 2023, and Musk wrote it off as a hit piece from the beginning. He has stayed on the attack since, calling the finished documentary a “hit piece that misses” in a post on X and saying Gibney has “zero integrity.”
Among those who do appear: Ashley St. Clair, the former MAGA influencer who had a relationship with Musk and is the mother of his 13th child, plus 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.
The Trophy and the Thin Receipts
That same night, the Critics Choice Documentary Awards in New York named “Musk” the year’s best biographical documentary. The film had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September.
Theaters have been less generous than juries. Released by Bleecker Street, the documentary opened on four screens and then earned $307,000 across 468 screens in its expansion — a per-screen average of $649, against the $4,027 per screen that the “Melania” documentary averaged on 1,778 screens.
“Musk” is now available on demand.
Gibney frames his subject as a 21st-century reincarnation of the confidence man, and the film ends by arguing that Musk has bet everything on artificial intelligence and no longer fears for humanity’s survival because he has a plan B.