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

New three-part documentary sheds a light on how Musk became the world’s richest man

Elon Musk and his mother, Maye
Elon Musk and his mother, Maye, attend the 2022 Costume Institute Benefit on 2 May 2022 in New York City
(Image credit: Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

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.

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.

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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.

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