Ashlee Vance, author of one of a couple of Elon Musk biographies floating around out there—and specifically the SpaceX-focused Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, And The Quest For A Fantastic Future—has popped up on social media this week to state that a planned HBO adaptation of the series has now formally “died” at HBO.
The series was initially announced to be in development back in 2020, when Musk was in a different, arguably less-immediately-impactful-to-a-regular-person phase in his campaign to be the main character of a planetary dystopia. (We’re talking two years before he bought Twitter, for instance, in case it’s all turned into a time slurry slowly drizzling through your heads the way it has for us.) At the very least, it was a period of time where HBO could be forgiven for thinking they were signing on—with Channing Tatum in a producing role—for a show about some flavor of visionary, and not that guy who turns meme names into actual programs for chopping the United States’ foreign aid budget into pieces.
Vance claimed in his post—on X, natch—that he and his team “Had some wonderful scripts. They were smart and funny and true to life. I imagine it would have been a massive hit.” Suggesting that people are afraid to make a project about Musk now, Vance noted that the rights to his book have now reverted to him, in case any TV studios with hagiography in their hearts and cash burning a hole in their pockets want to bite.
Interestingly, while HBO hasn’t commented directly on Vance’s post, Deadline does quote sources who actually say the project was passed on by the network a few years back, making it less clear why the author, who’s also apparently producing projects on brain-computer interfaces and OpenAI—guy has a type, we’ll give him that—is opening up about the whole thing falling apart now.
