Glass Onion's Rian Johnson Denies That Elon Musk Was A Direct Inspiration
Rian Johnson really, really wants you to stop saying this one thing about "Glass Onion."
The second "Knives Out" film from the writer-director — which, like its predecessor, focuses on Daniel Craig's Southern-fried detective Benoit Blanc solving a mystery — hit theaters for a one week engagement in November before arriving on Netflix just in time for Christmas, and since its theatrical release, audiences have been buzzing about one tech mogul that seems to be a major inspiration for the movie.
In the aftermath of Elon Musk's controversial, wildly expensive, and overly clumsy takeover of Twitter, "Glass Onion" fans rushed to compare Musk to the movie's tech billionaire Miles Bron (Ed Norton). On the surface, it's certainly an apt comparison; Miles and Musk are both larger-than-life figures with money to burn and a steady following of people who think they're innovative geniuses (despite all indications to the contrary, as Musk has shown during his tenure as the CEO of Twitter).
Johnson, for his part, wants to put an end to this comparison once and for all — here's what the filmmaker had to say about all this Musk chatter.
Rian Johnson says the Musk-Miles connection is a wild coincidence
In a recent interview with Wired, Johnson denied that he wrote a character even remotely based on Elon Musk, calling it a "horrible accident."
Asked about the timing of the film releasing just as Musk's disastrous takeover of Twitter began, Johnson replied, "It's so weird. It's very bizarre. I hope there isn't some secret marketing department at Netflix that's funding this Twitter takeover."
"There's a lot of general stuff about that sort of species of tech billionaire that went directly into it," he continued. "But obviously, it has almost a weird relevance in exactly the current moment. A friend of mine said, 'Man, that feels like it was written this afternoon.' And that's just sort of a horrible, horrible accident, you know?"
Obviously, Johnson wrote the script for "Glass Onion" long before Musk revealed to the world that he is perhaps not quite as bright as most people previously thought, but lampooning the type of person Musk is was the intention all along. "On this one, once I had a tech billionaire at the top of the suspect pyramid, then the type of friends that they would have and the tenor of everything came together," Johnson said. "Because the intent was to accurately reflect what it's been like to have our heads in the middle of the cultural sphere for the past six years. It's a pretty nightmarish kind of carnival, Fellini-esque inflated reality right now."
Elon Musk's own platform is comparing him to Miles Bron en masse
Meanwhile, over on the active volcano known as Twitter, users are only too happy to compare Musk and Miles, no matter what Johnson might say. As Twitter user @prashatsa simply put it, "There's an Elon Musk documentary on Netflix under the name of Glass Onion, and I cannot recommend it enough," and @RadioFreeTom, a writer at The Atlantic, wrote, "Lynn and I watched 'Glass Onion' tonight, and man, if I were Elon Musk, I'd be pissed." However, the best take might come from @vvvmiserable: "knives out: glass onion is an exact portrayal of what would happen if elon musk actually had 7 friends."
The loudest Musk-related reaction to "Glass Onion," however, came from conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who went on a lengthy early morning Twitter rant shortly after the film hit Netflix complaining about how the movie's "dumb" billionaire couldn't possibly correlate to Elon Musk. Naturally, Twitter clapped back at Shapiro too; user @rorschachisgay wrote, "[Ben] shapiro getting furious about glass onion and saying it doesnt [sic] make any sense that miles would be a parody of elon musk because musk is actually so smart and successful is hysterical. its [sic] like watching a cat hissing at its own reflection."
"Glass Onion," which isn't about Elon Musk but also clearly reminds people of the billionaire, is streaming on Netflix now.