Why the Left Hates Elon

The Hollywood Reporter put Elon Musk on its cover this week with a headline calling him one of the most dangerous men on Earth.

Not because he launched something. Because Alex Gibney needed a trailer.

The film is called Musk. It runs 232 minutes at Venice on September 8, 3 hours and 45 in theaters on October 16, and a full four hours when HBO airs it in 2027. Gibney announced it in 2023. Elon called it a hit piece before a single frame was cut. Three years and one cover story later, the director has confirmed the diagnosis in his own words: the film “reframes” Musk as the “21st century reincarnation of the confidence man.”

Read that again. The man who lands rockets on barges is a con man. The man who made the electric car real is a con man. The man whose satellites kept Ukraine online while Europe wrung its hands is a con man. Says a documentarian. Whose last rocket was a metaphor.

The film uses video-game reenactments to make the point, because when you cannot compete with a man’s actual output you can at least render him as a cartoon. David Byrne sings the closing credits, a song stitched from Musk’s own quotes and turned against him. Sam Harris shows up to diagnose “psychopathology” from a podcast microphone. Geoffrey Hinton floats a theory that DOGE’s brief look at federal data was a dress rehearsal for rigging the midterms with AI, and then, by THR’s own reporting, the film produces no evidence it happened. An ex-girlfriend reads out texts about “ten thousand lasers in space” as if a man who owns ten thousand satellites were confessing to something.

The headline quote, the one they built the whole cover around, is secondhand. Gibney says someone told him Musk was the most miserable man they’d ever met.

That is the case. Four hours of it. Somebody told a guy who told a magazine.

You have seen this movie before

I am a cardiologist. I read patterns for a living. Here is the pattern.

Step one: declare him dangerous. Not wrong. Not reckless. Dangerous. Democracy-ending. The word matters because it turns disagreement into self-defense, and once you are defending yourself, anything goes.

Step two: pathologize. Get a podcaster to say the clinical words. Treat every joke, every 2 a.m. post, every relationship, every ambitious claim as a symptom. He isn’t building the future. He’s unwell.

Step three: never look at the scoreboard. Show the monkeys. Do not show the paralyzed patients typing with their minds. Show the tweets. Do not show the boosters landing.

Step four: dehumanize. Video-game avatar. Bond villain. Oz behind the curtain. Once he is a cartoon, nothing done to him counts.

They ran this on Trump for ten years. Russia hoax, two impeachments, 91 felony counts, a mugshot, and two assassination attempts. It produced two presidencies. It did not produce one apology.

They ran it on Charlie Kirk. For years the same institutions called a debate-club kid with a microphone a menace, a fascist, a danger to students, and then on September 10 of last year someone shot him dead on a college campus in front of those students. And the people who had spent a decade telling the country he was dangerous discovered, for about seventy-two hours, the concept of restraint. Then they went back to work.

Now it is Elon. Same words. Same magazines. Same podcasters. A four-hour film whose thesis is that he is uniquely dangerous and secretly fake, released into a country where the last two men they said that about got shot.

Are you paying attention?

Why the Left needs him to be a fraud

Here is the part nobody in that magazine will say out loud.

The modern Left does not build. It curates. It reviews. It hosts panels. It writes the cover story about the man who did the thing. Its entire economy runs on being on the right side of history, and that only pays if the other side is losing.

Elon is not losing. That is the crime.

He is the walking proof that talking about the future and building it are different jobs, and that the second one is worth more. Every booster that lands upright is a small public humiliation for a room full of people who explained why it couldn’t. Every Starlink dish on a roof in a village with no fiber is a rebuttal to a think-piece. Every paralyzed patient moving a cursor with a thought is an argument no festival jury can answer.

The same institutions now demanding four hours of your life to explain why Musk must be stopped spent the previous fifteen years explaining why he was a joke.

Tesla was a rich man’s toy. Now every automaker on Earth copies the architecture. Reusable rockets were science fiction. Now they are Tuesday. Starlink was a vanity project. Now it is the only internet that works in a war. Free speech was a slogan. Then he bought the town square and stopped letting them run the editorial meeting, and suddenly free speech was a threat to democracy.

They were wrong about all of it. In public. On the record. A functioning press would reckon with that. This one made a movie and called him miserable.

And notice what changed. When Elon was building electric cars and the Left could claim him, he was a genius. The second he bought Twitter and let the other half of the country talk, he became a Nazi. Nothing about the man changed. The only thing that changed was who was allowed to speak.

That is the tell. They never hated the rockets. They hated losing the mute button.

The ledger they won’t show you

Let’s do what the film will not. Let’s look at what the “confidence man” actually shipped.

Tesla turned the electric car from a virtue signal into the default performance vehicle and forced the entire industry to follow. Megapack and Powerwall took the battery out of the lab and put it on the grid, which is the only reason solar and wind work at scale instead of at press conferences. Full Self-Driving and the Cybercab are the bet that traffic deaths are a software problem. Optimus is the bet that labor scarcity is a robotics problem.

SpaceX ended the era of the disposable rocket. NASA buys rides from a company now, not a ministry. In June it went public in the largest IPO in history, roughly $75 billion. That is not a lifestyle brand. That is the industrial base for a species that intends to outlive its own planet.

Starlink has more than ten thousand satellites overhead and about twelve million subscribers. Trenches, islands, disaster zones, ships, planes, farms where fiber will never come. If you live in a city you forget it exists. If you live where the last mile failed, it is the difference between silence and a voice.

xAI, now inside SpaceX, built a frontier model that refused the same hall-monitor filter every other lab swallowed, and built the power and chips underneath it, because AI abundance is not a keynote. It is watts and wafers.

X. He bought a dying town square that had become a one-party speech cartel and forced it open. Advertisers fled. The arguers stayed. Democracy without an unfiltered argument is a press release with better lighting. He gave the argument back. Hollywood has not forgiven him.

Neuralink has implanted more than twenty patients with spinal-cord injuries and ALS. They are moving cursors, playing games, going back to work, and beginning to speak again through a machine that reads their intention. The film dwells on the monkeys. I am a physician. I dwell on the police sergeant in Vancouver with ALS who got his chip in May.

The Boring Company digs tunnels under Las Vegas so a convention city can move people underground instead of paving another lot. Unsexy. Real.

Stack those and you get the list that went viral on X this week as Elon’s “crimes”:

1. Give the world clean, abundant energy.

2. Bring AI and robotics abundance.

3. Cure blindness and disabilities.

4. Preserve freedom of speech.

5. Make humanity multi-planetary so our species survives and wins.

Truly evil stuff. Elon reposted it with a laughing emoji. That one post did more damage to the documentary than the documentary will ever do to him.

The disappearance test

Run the experiment the film is built to keep you from running.

If The Hollywood Reporter vanished tomorrow, who would notice? The publicists who plant items in it. A few thousand subscribers who would find the next trade paper by Thursday. The Left would lose one more mirror to admire itself in.

If Elon’s companies vanished tomorrow, the grid loses its largest batteries. Half a planet’s worth of remote users lose the internet. American astronauts lose their ride to orbit. Launch cadence collapses to 1990s levels. Twenty-some paralyzed people lose the only working link between their thoughts and the world. And the public square snaps back to a curated feed run by the same editors who cheered when it was curated.

That gap is the whole story. That is what they cannot stand. Not the posting. Not the girlfriends. Not the “power.” The scoreboard.

A cover story lasts a news cycle. A landed booster, a grid battery, a satellite over a village with no fiber, a paralyzed kid moving a cursor with a thought, those last decades. When the history of this century is written, the most consequential human in it will not be the man who spent three years in an edit bay rendering him as a video-game villain.

They know that. It is why the film is four hours long. Shorter would have left room to think.

What they are actually asking you to do

They are asking you to look away from the rockets and look at the tweets. To trade the man who builds for the people who review. To agree that the most productive human alive is a fraud on the word of a documentarian, a podcaster, and an ex.

They ran this on Trump and he is president. They ran it on Kirk and he is dead. They are running it on Elon now, and they would like you to nod along, feel superior, and not notice what happens to the men they call dangerous.

Don’t.

The Left is always on the wrong side of the things that scale. That is the documentary someone should make. It would fit in ninety minutes, and the ending would be a rocket landing.

Blessings.

Afshine Ash Emrani, M.D., F.A.C.C.
Assistant Clinical Professor, UCLA
David Geffen School of Medicine

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