For the past ten years, Harvard MBAs have been evaluating the strategic vision and risk-taking of Elon Musk through a series of cases written by David Yoffie. The first, Elon Musk’s Big Bets, published in 2016, asked whether Musk could pull off a $5 billion gigafactory, a move into home and utility batteries and the purchase of SolarCity while Tesla was still losing money, or whether he was exposing investors to too much risk.
By 2022, Doubling Down: Elon Musk’s Big Bets in 2022 had added SEC litigation and safety concerns about Autopilot to the list, but still framed the choice as one of timing: deal with the problems first, or keep expanding?
Yoffie’s most recent case, Elon Musk, 2025: The Master of Big Bets?, introduces a question mark. It covers Tesla, SpaceX and xAI alongside the backlash from Musk’s politics, and asks students whether his ambitions across industry and government amount to “visionary leadership or overextension”.
That question mark is about to get a lot bigger. Musk, the new documentary from Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on 8 September. It runs to almost four hours and puts the man, as well as the businessman, under the microscope. The critics’ verdict is damning, and it raises an awkward question for business schools: if this is who Musk is, how should his ventures be taught?
What the cases leave out
The case method puts students in the protagonist’s chair. You are the CEO; what do you do next? That is its great strength. But it also means the people on the receiving end of a decision tend to appear as risk factors, lawsuits or lines in a spreadsheet.
Gibney’s film does the opposite. Musk declined to take part, so he appears as an AI-generated avatar speaking only words he has said in public. The screen time goes instead to the people around him: Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, his first wife Justine, his father Errol, Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of his children, and former USAID head Samantha Power, alongside dashcam footage of fatal Tesla crashes.
Almost none of it is new. IndieWire called the film “less bombshell than summary of how we got here.” But most critics argued that the summary is what gives it its force. Owen Gleiberman in Variety called it “lacerating and important” because it “puts him together, letting us see how one chapter of his life led to the next.” We have absorbed Musk one headline at a time. Four hours in a dark room turns the headlines into a pattern.
That pattern suggests four ways the Musk cases could look different in the classroom.
From “big bets” to “whose bets?”
The 2022 case lists Autopilot safety as one issue to manage alongside expansion, and the film puts faces to it. It revisits the deposition in which a Tesla engineer said a celebrated 2016 video of a car driving itself had been staged, and that the car crashed into a fence during filming. More than 60 deaths have been linked to crashes involving Tesla’s driver-assistance systems.
The same logic runs through the second half. Twitter’s mass layoffs are rendered as a video game. At DOGE, the cost-cutting that shut USAID leaves Samantha Power choked up as she describes a projection of more than 14 million preventable deaths by 2030.
A strategy class weighs whether a bet is worth it for shareholders. The film asks who pays when it goes wrong.
The story is the product
Gibney’s central claim is that Musk’s talent is not engineering but selling the future. “He’s not an inventor, he’s an investor,” he told the Associated Press. “His genius is stock pumping.” Eberhard, pushed out of Tesla in 2007, recalls Musk telling him nobody could take away the fact that he was the company’s founder – before Musk went on to claim the title himself. “He has an ego problem,” Eberhard says.
None of this would surprise Aswath Damodaran at NYU Stern, who described Tesla as a “story stock” back in 2016, a company whose value rests more on its narrative than its numbers. He wondered then whether Musk the visionary could become Musk the builder. Gleiberman’s answer, after watching the film, is that Musk is “a creator of mirages who promises more than he delivers.”
Business schools rightly teach storytelling as a leadership skill. The Musk story is a chance to teach where it tips into something else.
Why did we let him?
Gibney frames the whole film around one question: not just how one man became so powerful, but why the rest of us let him. That is a governance question, and it belongs in the classroom.
In September 2025, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques of Yale School of Management argued that Tesla’s board, in backing a pay package that could be worth up to $1 trillion, was suffering from “what political scientists and psychologists call ‘groupthink,’ psychiatrists label folie à deux, social workers call ‘codependence.’” Two months later, more than 75% of the votes cast were in favour. INSEAD’s Manfred Kets de Vries, who has spent decades studying narcissistic leaders, describes the “hall of mirrors” they create, where leaders and followers reinforce each other’s distorted views.
The checks did not stop at the boardroom door. In June, when SpaceX listed on Nasdaq, Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. Gautam Mukunda, who teaches leadership at Yale, argues that “the exchange rate between wealth and power has never been so favorable.” He points to the moment when Donald Trump threatened to cancel Musk’s federal contracts and Musk threatened to ground the capsule NASA relies on: “That’s not the rule of law; it’s two rival courts negotiating a cease-fire.”
There is no case study template for a CEO who has worked inside the government that regulates his companies.
The man and the businessman
This is the hardest question for the case method. Does Musk’s private life belong in a strategy class?
The film’s answer is yes, because the pattern is the same. Justine Musk says it was she, not Elon, who was holding their first son, Nevada, when he died in 2002, contradicting Musk’s own account. “I learned the term gaslighting through my relationship with Elon,” she says. St. Clair told the Venice press conference she had been “offered the opportunity not to speak for $40 million”, which Musk disputes, and says his “most complicated relationship is with the truth.” Errol Musk recalls his young son carrying on reading comics while a man was being resuscitated by the roadside.
Stanford’s Charles O’Reilly, whose research shows that narcissistic leaders build cultures with less integrity and less collaboration, has a warning for anyone who teaches from success stories: “We see the 10% of narcissists that succeeded and call them visionaries. We’re not looking at the 90% who flamed out and caused irreparable damage.”
Gibney has his own name for it: “noble cause corruption”. He puts Musk in the same line as Enron and Elizabeth Holmes, both subjects of his earlier films – people who told themselves a big enough goal justified breaking the rules. “His motives may have been pure at the beginning,” he says. “But over time… he ruthlessly broke the rules.”
The case for the defence
None of this cancels out what Musk has built. Reusable rockets, a mass-market electric car and a satellite network covering most of the planet are real achievements. As HBS’s Andy Wu put it in 2022, “What Musk has accomplished so far at Tesla and SpaceX is really unbelievable and impressive and really special.”
Musk himself dismissed the film on X as “a hit piece that misses, and makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours,” and his lawyers dispute St. Clair’s claims about Starlink and the 2024 election, which several critics also found unconvincing.
The hero story is also sticky. Dag Øivind Madsen of the University of South-Eastern Norway has traced how the heroic image of Musk built in the early years of Tesla and SpaceX has been reinterpreted rather than dropped, even as opinion about him has split. The classroom may not change much at all.
But the best thing about the case method is that it does not tell students what to think. It gives them the facts and asks them to decide. Gibney’s film makes a strong argument that, for ten years, students have been given only half the file.
No reset button
If there is a 2027 update to Yoffie’s series, the question may no longer be whether Musk is the master of big bets, but who covers the losses when they don’t pay off.
In 1898 H.G. Wells wrote a short story about a clerk called George McWhirter Fotheringay who discovers he can work miracles. Encouraged to think bigger, he orders the Earth to stop spinning, forgetting that everything on its surface will keep moving. The world is destroyed. His last miracle is to give his powers away and put everything back as it was. Musk shows no sign of doing the same.
Business schools can’t give the power back either. But they can stop teaching the miracles without the wreckage.
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