Glass Onion is not not about Elon Musk, says Rian Johnson

Although Rian Johnson says he didn't directly base Edward Norton's Miles off of the Tesla founder, he admits Musk's antics give Glass Onion a "weird relevance"

By Hattie Lindert  |  December 28, 2022 | 4:49pm
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Glass Onion is not not about Elon Musk, says Rian Johnson
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Edward Norton in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery Image: NETFLIX

If Edward Norton’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’s character Miles—a tech-bro billionaire who loves fancy toys, expensive homes, and his own too-big-to-fail ideas—looks familiar, well…

According to director Rian Johnson, the man-child at the center of Glass Onion’s murder mystery isn’t based on Twitter’s tech-bro-in-chief, Elon Musk— but the timing of Musk’s rise at Twitter draws a clear comparison. When asked in a recent conversation with WIRED’s Angela Watercutter if he would ever make a Knives Out-style mystery about the downfall of Twitter, he responded with a laugh: “Didn’t I just do that?”

“It’s so weird. It’s very bizarre,” Johnson opines about the overlap between Musk’s tenure as Twitter CEO and the release of Glass Onion. “I hope there isn’t some secret marketing department at Netflix that’s funding this Twitter takeover.” (Now that would be an exposé).

Although Miles and Musk come off as unbelievably similar (right down to the dramatically casual wardrobe), Johnson says that he didn’t exactly base Norton’s character off of the Tesla founder. After all, as Johnson points out: “There’s a lot of general stuff about that sort of species of tech billionaire that went directly into it.”

He continues: “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?”

As far as horrible accidents go, Glass Onion certainly makes for one that’s hard to look away from—as of this writing, the Knives Out mystery sits as the #1 film on Netflix with over 82M hours viewed. Now the real question: how many of those hours were Musk himself, furiously preparing the perfect trolling reply tweet to shoot in Johnson’s direction?

 
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