Few names in the world are as certain to provoke vastly different reactions as Elon Musk. He could be the Antichrist but he could also be the Messiah. So, the new documentary Elon Musk Unveiled – The Tesla Experiment gives up its game from its title. You won’t expect the unveiling of a character like Musk to reveal only his greatest hits.
Working heavily from an investigative piece by German publication Handelsblatt, German director Andreas Pichler presents the case against Tesla, one of the main businesses synonymous with the Musk name. He is chiefly interested in its self-driving claims and the harm that claim has done. To listen to Musk on the subject is to hear a creation of Silicon Valley declare that what his company has built will save lives. But that may not be quite the whole story because as one interviewee puts it, “Silicon Valley is a heat-seeking missile to money”. Saving lives is fine but Tesla has its share price to worry about.
In presenting his case, Pichler juggles the rise of Musk – shockingly boyish in some of the footage here – with an account of the survivor of an accident who lost his girlfriend after a self-driving Tesla failed to take a turn. Former staffers speak about the world’s richest man and his car company, comparing Tesla’s early business model to a pyramid scheme. They raised cash as though they had made a certain number of vehicles, while hoping they could succeed in making up those numbers from the cash raised.
To hear these former staffers is to marvel at the moral apparatus in the company. To hear them is also to get an idea of the moment Tesla switched from a company making cool cars to one with an appetite to take over the automotive industry. It began with the Model S sometime in the early 2010s. It may also be the time that Musk physically transforms into the form we know at the moment, although one former staff says that even in the early days “we oftentimes did ask ourselves if he was human”. The jury might still be out on that one as we see in one rather robotic 2024 interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Unfortunately, there are very real consequences for Musk’s self-proclaimed ambitions. By releasing cars with still developing technology to the market, he has turned buyers into beta testers endangering their own lives and the lives of others. Unveiled shows that Tesla does know that claiming utter safety in the marketing of its self-driving cars is fibbing. It is, however, committed to denying culpability when the inevitable crashes occur.
Pichler presents this case convincingly, giving his documentary its surest footing. The whistleblower responsible for the Handelsblatt article shows up on camera, as do former employees who didn’t quite keep unsavoury company info to themselves, leading to less than graceful employment terminations. These persons give the documentary its most damning dimensions with regards to the business and tech of Tesla; the surviving boyfriend and his late girlfriend’s sister give the film its emotional resonance.
There’s a political angle as well. But this is where the film enters murky waters. One person says the Trump/Musk alliance was a move to essentially buy out the US government. Which is probably not a problem in a documentary of this sort — but it’s not hard to begin to suspect that even more extracurricular concerns would show up, the most of egregious might be the decision to include the controversial Nazi-or-not- Nazi salute from Musk following Trump’s electoral victory.
Thankfully and admirably, the footage is not editorialised. In putting up these political bits, the documentary misses the chance to offer a statistical comparison on safety levels between the Tesla and non-self-driving cars or even between Tesla and other self-driving cars. The latter is addressed briefly in the second half with the mention of Musk’s rejection of Lidar, a technology that some car manufacturers endorse, but there are no numbers to add width for non-technical viewers.
Ultimately, Unveiled is a serviceable investigative documentary. It will certainly find its audience everywhere in the world – Elon Musk will remain a commercial draw for a mighty long time – but would it show in the US? At IDFA, where the documentary premiered last night, the film’s director and producer couldn’t say for sure. No surprises there.
Director: Andreas Pichler
Screenplay: Andreas Pichler, Anne von Petersdorff, Christian Beetz
Producer: Christian Beetz
Executive producers: Yara Hueck Costa, Anne von Petersdorff, Martin Pieper
Cinematography: Jakob Stark, Tom Bergmann
Editing: Johannes Hiroshi Nakajima, Beatrice Segolini, Nicolas Nørgaard Staffolani
Music: Henning Fuchs
Production company: Beetz Brothers (Germany)
World Sales: Mediawan Rights
Venue: IDFA (Frontlight)
In English, German
90 minutes
