A24, the indie film outfit behind hits including “Ex Machina” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” is developing a biopic of Elon Musk, with “The Whale” director Darren Aaronofsky at the helm.
According to trade paper Variety, the film will be based on Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of the tech mogul, who serves as the CEO of EV manufacturer Tesla and spaceflight firm SpaceX.
Isaacson has past form with biopics; his 2011 biography of Steve Jobs was adapted into the 2015 film of the same name starring Michael Fassbender as the Apple co-founder.
Aaronofsky’s most recent film was 2022 drama “The Whale,” starring Brendan Fraser in an Oscar-winning turn as a morbidly obese teacher. His previous credits include 2000’s “Requiem for a Dream,” 2008’s “The Wrestler” and 2010’s “Black Swan.”
The wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of over $200 billion, Musk rose to prominence as CEO of payments firm PayPal. In 2002, he founded SpaceX, before acquiring Tesla in 2004. He acquired social media platform Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, rebranding it as X—a name previously used by the billionaire for an online bank he co-founded in 1999.
Most recently, Musk has ventured into other fields of emerging technology, including an AI chatbot, Grok, “modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and Neuralink, a company working on brain-computer interfaces. A fan of the meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin, Musk has dabbled in cryptocurrency; at one point announcing a short-lived initiative for Tesla to take payments in Bitcoin.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
