Tell me, Muse, of the adventures of a man. A man of resources, driven time and again off course, having plundered the sacred town of Troy. Or if you can’t be bothered, O Muse, just pull up the link to Elon Musk’s Wikipedia page and call it close enough.
It’s been some months now since Musk, memelord Odysseus of Big Tech Ithaca, first set his sights on The Odyssey, Homer’s classic epic of hubris and consequence. Musk – the much-despised CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and possibly the richest man in human history – was one of the loudest critics of the “historical inaccuracies” in Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation. (These largely boiled down to the inclusion of non-white actors among its dozens-strong cast, and, in Elliot Page, the casting of a trans man playing the Greek soldier Sinon.) Nolan was, said Musk at the time, an “anti-white racist”. A wider right-wing boycott ultimately proved about as effective as a Trojan horse made entirely of glass: The Odyssey opened to rave reviews, and has earned $1.794bn, making it the 11th biggest film of all time. Still, Nolan’s Odyssey faced another threat: a rival Odyssey adaptation, proposed by Musk and developed entirely using AI. This one, claimed Musk, would be “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer”.
