IP Picks🔎: Would You Option the New Musk Bio?
âž• An alien in rural America, a 'Mare of Easttown'-style mystery and a feel-good story about an autistic underdog athlete
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
This week brought the publication of Musk by celebrated biographer Walter Isaacson. It was accompanied by a high-profile excerpt in The Washington Post that said the SpaceX and X (née Twitter) owner had turned off Starlink access for Ukraine near the border with Crimea to prevent them from launching an attack that, in Musk's mind, might have led to nuclear war. That explosive claim was retracted after a furious backlash to the idea of Musk meddling against an important American ally. There have been other revelations as well, including his belief that people should have more children (and a previously unreported third child with Grimes), his mental health struggles and his strained relationship with transgender daughter, Vivian. The reviews have been middling at best (Gary Shteyngart’s deliciously savage takedown in The Guardian is a personal favorite).
Of course, the book has been on my radar for months but every time I thought about including it in The Optionist, I shrugged with indifference, thinking I’d wait until publication. The manuscript wasn't available and except for a few high-profile exceptions, I don't tout a book that I haven't seen. Also, I'm not a fan of Isaacson, who I think is wildly overrated. He's generally a supplicant to his subject and I find his books superficial. More importantly, I wasn't sure about Musk as a subject — he's just not the kind of person you'd want to spend a couple of hours with — or what the narrative arc of a biopic would be. Lots of his story feels unfinished to me and of the key bits we know about (Tesla, the Twitter acquisition, SpaceX), none felt like a movie to me.
Still, I try not to let my personal biases rule The Optionist. Isaacson, for example, has his fans in Hollywood. Jobs was based on his book (though I'll argue Aaron Sorkin is why that movie worked) and Leonardo Di Caprio optioned his Leonardo da Vinci bio. And there have been many biopics about odious characters. Take the limited series about Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann as two recent examples. So I decided to check in with CAA, which represents Isaacson, about the status of the rights. They're available, and any deal does not require Musk's cooperation (something I suspected was true, but wanted to confirm).
Would you option Musk? Do you think someone will?
On the one hand, he's a hugely important figure, a larger-than-life personality with a crazy personal life, and there's lots of corporate drama in his dealings. All that seems like the basis for a biopic or limited series. On the other hand, I think he comes across as weird (and not weird-interesting like Holmes or Neumann, just weird). Watching someone play him on screen for a couple of hours sounds like torture to me. He's also gotten caught up in political divisions in a way that I think works against a biopic. He's basically seen (fairly or unfairly) as aligned with the far right and the very online bros in a way that alienates a huge chunk of a potential audience.
I still don't see the movie either. Where do you start and where do you stop? Maybe at some moment in the future there'll be an end point — X goes bankrupt, he sends a manned mission to Mars or something like that — that suggests a movie arc, but for now it feels like any movie would just trail off.
Lastly (and this looms large in my mind): Even though Musk could be optioned and made without Elon's participation or approval, can you imagine the stink he'd make if he didn't like it? First, he'd probably threaten to sue a million times and, as we know, he could fund a dozen lawsuits with the spare change under his couch cushions alone. Second, even if he didn't sue, he still controls a major social media platform where he personally has 156M followers he can use to rail against the movie. Who needs that headache and all that negative publicity when there are so many good projects you could do with less hassle?
So what do you think? Is there a movie in Musk or not? Would you buy it? If not you, who do you think is the most likely person to pick up the rights?
On to this week’s picks, which are highlighted a feel-good sports story and a 1950s-set historical drama. The full rundown:
A small town-set mystery with a Mare of Easttown vibe.
A high-concept adventure movie that’s Die Hard in space.
A serial-killer thriller that coincides with arrival of alien life in a rural town.
A true-crime journalism procedural centered on exposing a doctor who got away with sexually assaulting his patients for decades.
A true-life feel-good story about an autistic 12-year-old who won a national golf championship with borrowed clubs, basketball sneakers and barely three rounds of experience under his belt.
