Venice Without Musk: A Memory Match With No Protagonist on the Pitch

I came to Venice as a spectator, not as a sports reporter. This year's festival awards had no football rolling down the red carpet, no coach standing before a microphone to explain defeat. But in the auditorium where Alex Gibney's documentary "Musk" had just premiered, I recognised a contest I have known for forty years: the contest of memory, of human beings turned into characters, and of a powerful man who chose not to show up. Alex Gibney is no stranger to stories of power and corruption. He has brought Enron, Theranos and fallen empires to the screen. He approaches a story like a prosecutor gathering evidence — coldly stacking details until the viewer draws the inevitable conclusion. This time his subject is Elon Musk, the man who turned the electric car into a global craze and launched rockets toward Mars. But Gibney has not made a hagiography. He hands the microphone to Justine Musk, the former wife who spent eight years beside Elon, from 2026 to 2026. Justine tells of a young man who once sat by her bedside in a university library, talking about stars and grand dreams. She tells of the "alpha" man who could psychologically manipulate — she uses the term "gaslighting," a quiet drizzle that slowly erodes a person's sense of reality. She speaks of the death of Nevada, their first child, taken by SIDS at ten weeks old. She speaks of how their children grew up in their father's immense shadow, and of Vivian, the daughter who cut off contact, petitioned to change her name and shed her father's surname, and alleged that he cut off her access to health insurance. This is not a football match. There is no goal to celebrate, no tactic to dissect. But to a storyteller it resembles a final without a winner — and that is the kind of contest I have learned to listen to over decades. There are defeats that leave no trophy to anyone, yet their echoes ring long through collective memory. What draws my attention is not the nature of the allegations. It is the way they are told. Justine wrote about her marriage as early as 2026, in an essay for Marie Claire. Fifteen years later, in Gibney's film, she has barely changed her account. Not because her memory is perfect, but because her pain has a stable narrative spine. In football I would call it cohesion — when a story is repeated over many years, it becomes something even sceptics must acknowledge has substance. Musk, by contrast, did not participate. He called the film a "hit piece," staged by a biased director. He chose not to sit for an interview, not to appear on camera, not to offer any explanation. His representative remained silent when the film premiered. Like a team retreating to the dressing room before kick-off, Musk left an empty seat on the bench and allowed his opponent to control the rhythm of the match entirely. Silence is a statement, and a dangerous one. When the most powerful man in the world refuses to take part in a film about his own life, he does more than hand his opponent the right to tell the story; he hands them a weapon to build a narrative with no rebuttal. In the courtroom of public opinion, absence is never read as innocence; it is read as silent admission. Yet it could also be a lawyer's wisdom: never argue with a screenwriter on his own stage. Musk knows Gibney is not the kind of journalist who can be led astray by angry answers. When you have no strong explanation, you have one option: leave the courtroom. That exit is a goal for Gibney, but it is also an own goal — because audiences always love the grey zones of silence. I once wrote: "Applause in an empty stadium is the most humane lie football has ever created." When a stadium has no spectators, the only applause left is inside the heads of fans watching through screens. They imagine they are there. They clap for what they believe is true. Likewise when we watch a documentary: the inner applause is not for objective truth, but for the story that satisfies us most — or hurts us in the way we want to be hurt. This match cannot be settled by VAR. No camera angle can see deep enough into the bedroom of a broken marriage; no xG data can quantify a lie; no statistic can reflect the pain of a child growing up in the shadow of a great but distant father. Gibney's four hours of footage are certainly equipped to persuade — I have not seen the film, only read the accounts of journalists in Venice. But the harder question, the one media often avoids, is whether a human being can be reduced to someone else's story about them. And if so, can all of us — supporting characters in our own lives — be scripted by others to such an extent? Justine has the right to tell her story. She was there on the nights no one saw, when no camera was rolling. She raised six children while her husband built PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla. She saw a man who not only never slept, but refused his own fragility. But her memory — anyone's memory — is footage edited by emotion. Details are selected not only for truth, but for pain. That does not make her account false, but it makes it a work with an author and a point of view. Gibney, like all great documentarians, is an artist disguised in a journalist's coat. He understands that viewers trust a beautiful frame more than a page of print. A forced smile from Justine recalling a sad memory; archival footage of Elon Musk in a boardroom with a cold face; a score placed under a mother's lonely scene — all stagecraft, like a football match, engineered to create emotion, not just information. And emotion, as I have learned after a thousand nights of commentary, is what ultimately decides the persuasiveness of any story. Perhaps this is why I, a football writer, feel the need to sit at the keyboard. In football we hear the stories of great players through the voices of coaches, sporting directors, agents — rarely through the people who actually sat on the bench, who saw the stars from behind, who never stood in the glorious light. When they do speak, it is not for fame but to be believed. Justine does not need anyone to think Elon is a villain. She needs people to believe that she was there, that her years were not meaningless, that she fought an oversized shadow in the dark. This reminds me of the mothers of young footballers at any academy in the world — women who drive their sons to training at five in the morning, stand in the rain, wipe sweat, and whisper instructions before kick-off. They never appear on television. No one interviews them. But they are the quietest storytellers of football. If you listen to them, you understand a player more deeply than any statistics sheet can offer. Vivian, Musk's daughter, chose a different name. She asked the court to recognise her new identity and to drop her father's surname. That is a penalty no defender on earth could block. In a broken family, the child does not just leave the field; the child changes the colours of their own life. And the father — the man who conquered space and turned impossibility into reality — could do nothing except call Gibney's film a "hit piece" and walk forward. People call it a market; I call it a garden where lives are planted. In the garden named Musk family, some saplings have died, some have moved away, some stand under a giant tree complaining they lack sunlight. Who gardened badly? Who cut the water? Who was never there on stormy days? These questions have no answers in a documentary, nor in the articles. They can only be answered — if ever — in the silence of a genuine conversation between human beings. Elon Musk is not merely a businessman. He is a global icon, polarising as powerfully as Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi in the football world. To millions he is a genius, a hero opening humanity's future. To others he is a dangerous buffoon. When an icon is questioned by those closest to him, the story ceases to be a private family matter. It becomes a match on a global stage — one in which every spectator has chosen a side long before the opening whistle. And that is our greatest blind spot. Not Gibney's, not Justine's, but that of the audiences lining up to have their prejudices confirmed. A documentary about a controversial figure always risks becoming a fixture where fans only want the home team to win. If you already hate Musk, the film makes you feel righteous. If you love him, you call it slander and walk away. In both cases you miss the most important thing: a family has fallen apart, and the people inside are hurting in their own separate ways. In football, when two old rivals meet again after years, they can shake hands after the final whistle. Veterans can sit down and remember each other with respect, because the line between them is the line of a match — finite, ruled, refereed. But when your story is told by someone who once loved you, and hers is told by you in the dark of a marriage, that handshake becomes an unhealable wound. No referee blows the whistle for a marriage. No rule decides who owns the last word of truth. I will not queue for the cinema on October 16, when the film opens officially. But I will listen to what the film generates in public conversation, just as I have listened to thousands of matches throughout my career. And perhaps, in the silence after the film ends, I will recall the lesson football has taught me for forty years: never judge a match by a single goal, and never judge a human being by a single story. Memory, like the ball, never rests — it rolls, bounces, and falls at someone's feet depending on the side we choose to stand on.