“To make this film, I set out to solve a mystery,” Gibney says in the documentary. “How could Musk assume so much power, and why had we given it to him?”

When Tesla introduced its first mass-market car, the Model 3, at an event in 2016, Elon Musk seemed like a different person from the one he is today. Boyish and trim, he started off his presentation by reminding the audience of Tesla’s mission and why everyone should care about what it was doing. “It’s very important to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport . . . this is really important for the future of the world,” he said. A screen behind him showed a chart of rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere; Musk noted that the line was still moving sharply up. “What that CO2 increase results in is a steadily increasing temperature. So we’ve already increased by two degrees. In fact, that doesn’t tell the whole story, because the extremes of temperature increased by as much as twenty degrees, and that line is gonna keep going for some time into the future.” Tesla was a critical part of pushing the world to electrify its vehicles, Musk went on, citing a former executive at General Motors who’d said that competitive pressure from Tesla pushed G.M. to introduce a hybrid car, the Chevrolet Volt, and spurred Nissan to release an electric model, the leaf. Much of the rest of the industry soon followed.