The Elon Musk Show: BBC2’s portrait of a disturbingly boyish billionaire

Elon Musk “a visionary, an eccentric, or something more dangerous?” BBC2’s new three-part documentary doesn’t draw any firm conclusions, said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph – but it does shed light on how he became the world’s richest man.

Though Musk doesn’t appear himself, there are interviews with people who know him well, including his doting mother, and both of his ex-wives. The odd Tesla employee pops up too, to attest to Musk’s single-minded drive (“My family life was not the highlight of my years at Tesla,” notes one).

The series is overly deferential, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. But its main flaw is that Musk just isn’t that interesting. We see him “working hard and expecting others to do the same”, but lots of wealthy entrepreneurs do that. Equally, there are plenty of men on the minimum wage who cycle through wives and girlfriends, so he is not special there either. Whatever his achievements, Musk is quite dull.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

You start to wonder if his success could have been “almost accidental”, said Rachel Cooke in The New Statesman. He comes across as disturbingly boyish: there is “the sense of a clock stopped at the age of 15”. In one clip, we find him sitting in front of the kind of poster you might see in a school physics lab, titled “Rockets of the World”. In another, he “boogies in his chinos” like a toddler listening to Steps. “The whole thing is vaguely Citizen Kane-ish”, and by the end, I was more confused about who Musk is than I was at the start.