Part 3 will be available soon.
Part 3 will be available soon.
Musk Fictions
6 Parts
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Part 3 will be available soon.
Iron Man, Elon Musk's fictional double, comes to America's rescue
In Depth'Musk Fictions' (2/6). In the late 2010s, the founder of SpaceX became fixated on the Marvel superhero Iron Man, viewing him as his fictional double.
The scene takes place in Monaco in 2010. On screen, Pepper Potts makes her way through the crowd in an elegant polka-dot dress to greet a strangely dressed Elon Musk, wearing a white jacket and a mismatched striped shirt. The look was reminiscent of the "engineer all dressed up" style of his early Tesla and SpaceX days. He is attending a Grand Prix on the Riviera, where Tony Stark, the heir and owner of Stark Industries – one of the main suppliers to the US military-industrial complex – is racing. The two men discuss an electric jet project, and Stark congratulates Musk on SpaceX's successful Merlin engine tests.
Everything in this sequence seems real, and yet it is entirely fictional. The imagined meeting is staged in Iron Man 2 (2010), directed by Jon Favreau. When Iron Man 2's producers offered him a cameo, Musk was still an up-and-coming entrepreneur. He had not yet gotten over being ousted as CEO of PayPal in 2000. He was frustrated at being the favorite target of "Valleywag," Silicon Valley's sensationalist blog, which mocked his ambitious dreams and predicted his bankruptcy every six months. On set, he exchanged a few calculated lines with actors Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr, showing his distinctive cadence.
The character of Iron Man, a Marvel superhero, was created in 1963 by Stan Lee (1922-2018). The comic book writer would later claim he deliberately invented a provocative figure to challenge his progressive 1960s readership. The saga follows the adventures of a young, patriotic business leader named Tony Stark who inherits a weapons company from his father, a genius inventor. Stark supplies the US military with innovative equipment. The first episode begins with the entrepreneur-salesman visiting the front. But the promotional tour turns into a fiasco. Stark is seriously wounded and captured by the Viet Cong. To survive and escape, he creates a powerful suit of armor that keeps his wounded heart alive and "teaches his captors a lesson."
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