Glass Onion Accidentally Predicted Elon Musk's Disastrous Twitter Takeover
This piece contains spoilers for "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery."
Perhaps one of the most obnoxious terms in the modern tech space is "disruption." It seems like every wannabe internet and crypto entrepreneur wants to call what they're doing a disruption in their respective spaces. Come on, guys, you can't all possibly be disrupting the same things. That's just not realistic!
In the world of "Glass Onion," billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) is certainly one of these types of entrepreneurs. He refers to his close group of friends as disruptors frequently throughout the film for varying reasons — for chemist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr.), it's because he's a genius who creates the science that fuels his Alpha Industries products, and for fashion designer Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), it's because she "speaks her mind." Yes, "speaking her mind" means being racist on Twitter, because of course that's what it means.
However, this constant talk about disruption and taking risks amid a sea of "no's" feels awfully familiar if you've been online at all for these past couple of weeks. That's because this is the exact rhetoric that "Machete Kills" and "Big Bang Theory" actor Elon Musk has repeated ever since gaining control of Twitter. The problem is that this same rhetoric has consistently blown up in his face. While Bron doesn't have his own social network, his reckless and ill-conceived experiments feel uncomfortably similar to Musk's recent online debacle.
When disruption becomes destruction
So, if Miles Bron doesn't have a social media network to haphazardly reorganize, what does he have? According to him, it's a "revolutionary" man-made substance called Klear that he presents as a clean fuel alternative. He's determined to run all Alpha Industries buildings and vehicles off of Klear, going so far as to run his beloved Glass Onion island home off of the stuff. Sure, it may not have been properly tested, and perhaps almost every executive besides Lionel wants him to stop its upcoming introductory press conference. However, that doesn't matter because it's "disrupting" the oil and gas industries.
This is not unlike how Musk has handled his acquisition of Twitter thus far. Everyone from former Twitter executives to the FTC wanted to let him know that it was a bad idea, that his lack of actual plans would only lead to failure, and what did he do? Go through with it anyways. Because of that, he has been responsible for such infamous events as promoting homophobic conspiracy theories, creating a massive loophole for misinformation by dismantling its strict verification guidelines, and significant layoffs that affected the future of critical website infrastructure. All of this, just to eventually say that he wants someone else to oversee the website, but doesn't know who. What a great plan!
An uncanny parallel
Sure, these are ultimately two different situations. However, it's hard to deny that there isn't a modicum of similarity between the fictional Bron and the real-life Musk. The only reason Musk had bought Twitter was because someone told him he couldn't. It was a move based on spite, and as such, millions of Internet users are paying the price. Bron is established to be the same exact way, willing to risk the lives of innocent people just to say that he made something "clean." He even admits to wanting to do anything to be mentioned in the same sentence as the Mona Lisa, and he eventually will be in the universe of the film – just not in the way that he wants.
Look, Rian Johnson can say that Bron is a composite character of obnoxious billionaires all he wants. That's completely fine, and we're certainly not trying to argue that he's lying. That being said, it's pretty damn obvious that Musk was a primary influence on the character based on one key character aspect, and that is his blinding desire for dominance. This doesn't necessarily mean that he has the skills to dominate. At least we can laugh at Bron's fictional exploits and failures because we certainly can't do that least we risk our Twitter accounts getting suspended. But hey, "vox populi, vox dei," right?
"Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery" is now playing for a week-long engagement in theaters before arriving on Netflix on December 23.