this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Iron man 1 came out and he had his PR team work around the clock to convince everyone he was the real life Tony Stark.
My pet theory is that Robert Downey Jr is the reason Elon musk is as successful as he is.
Considering RDJ's role as Tony Stark seems to have given Musk the template he used for his public rise to fame, you may be on to something.
it’s almost definitely the reason why Musk keeps making utterly cringe cameos in sci-fi shit, starting with Iron Man 2 and continuing on to Star Trek: Discovery and (of fucking course) Rick & Morty, and a bunch of other weird shit like the Saturday Night Live episode that was just propaganda. his former PR team very likely set up whatever price point worked for the studios so Musk could pay for a cameo, and Musk loved it so much he kept doing it after he fired that team.
what’s fucking bizarre is the Iron Man writers seem to swear their version of Tony Stark was based on Musk, and we know now Musk’s nothing like that. so looking back with more seasoned eyes: how much of the first Iron Man was just propaganda too? of course there’s all the libertarian shit — whose idea was all that, actually?
You want my suspicion, Marvel were probably taking their cues from the public image SpaceX/Tesla's marketing and/or Musk's PR team had put out about the guy - as an eccentric genius par excellence who'd save humanity from global warming and/or get us to Mars.