‘Glass Onion’ Both Is And Isn’t About Elon Musk, Says Rian Johnson

If you watched Glass Onion over this weekend, like millions of other people in metrics Netflix is no doubt about to brag about, you may have noticed that its central tech billionaire may or may not have felt somewhat…familiar.

Miles Bron, played by Edward Norton, is a tech billionaire with his hands in many pies, including space travel and automobiles, though to discuss him any further, we’ll have to get into spoiler territory.

While on the surface, you may think Bron’s companies resemble Elon Musk’s various corporations from Tesla to SpaceX, things seem to get even more on the nose as the mystery unfolds. One of the major reveals is that Bron is actually…an idiot, just not a terribly smart guy at baseline who had stolen his ideas or taken credit that was not his. True or not, these are also frequent criticisms made of Musk, particularly now in his Twitter ownership era, where every new decision he makes feels like an obviously bad one. But it goes beyond that, with many unwilling to give him credit for the successes of Tesla or SpaceX, despite him being the very public face of those companies, saying that he’s riding the success of others. Again, it’s what his sharpest critics have said for years.

But that raises the question. Did writer/director Rian Johnson do all this…on purpose? Was Miles Bron really supposed to be Elon Musk?

The answer is yes and no. This movie was developed and shot back in 2021, well before all of Musk’s most recent drama, but Johnson says Bron was a compilation of a larger pool of tech billionaires rather than one specific guy. But even he acknowledges the Musk parallels now, and feels surprised that this movie felt somewhat prescient given Musk’s recent behavior with the Twitter takeover. Here’s part of an interview with Wired that goes down this pathway into his thoughts about the Musk issue:

What’s going into the next one? Can you say what’s on your mind?

No. You got any ideas for me?

The downfall of Twitter?

Downfall of Twitter. Didn’t I just do that? [Laughs]

Actually, I was going to ask you about that. Here you have this movie with a tech billionaire at the center and as it’s coming out, everyone is watching Elon Musk’s erratic takeover of Twitter.

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.

Right? Like this was all the plan to get everybody to watch.

There’s a lot of general stuff about that sort of species of tech billionaire that went directly into it. 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?

So, you can see how it goes both ways. While Musk may originally been part of a sort of billionaire amalgam that also could have included the likes of Zuckerberg or Bezos, Johnson acknowledges that he accidentally sort of made a movie about Elon Musk that feels incredibly relevant for our current moment. Kind of wild.

So, what will Rian Johnson prophesy next with Knives Out 3?

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