Elon Musk has often been featured in stories pertaining to Jewish matters of interest. Most memorably for many, he made what may or may not have been a Nazi salute; the ADL concluded it was not but later chided him for making Holocaust jokes.
There was also the time he reinstated antisemites on X because it’s better to have “anti whatever out in the open,” and when he told Germany’s far-right AfP party that the country has “too much focus on past guilt.”
The artist formerly known as Kanye West once thanked him personally on the platform, whose name he famously changed from Twitter to X, for letting him “vent” (against the Jews, of course). And most recently, his platform’s Grok xAI went on antisemitic screeds.
And now, he might be played by Jewish actor and TV and film writer Ike Barinholtz, who was most recently nominated for an Emmy for his role as Jewish studio exec Sal Saperstein in “The Studio.” And to that, I say: Please, please make it happen. I need it right now, please and thank you.
First of all, Barinholtz, who is in talks to play Musk in the upcoming “Artificial” according to the Hollywood Reporter, will not be the only Jewish actor in this movie. Andrew Garfield is reportedly set to play Sam Altman, the gay Jewish co-creator and CEO of OpenAI, in this new Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name,” “Queer,” “Challengers”) film.
For those wondering what Musk has to do with it all, well, he was the co-founder of OpenAI. But the two men couldn’t bridge their differences about how to run the company, and Musk’s parting from the company was, well, less than amicable and quite litigious.
According to THR, when the project was first reported, it was “said to be based on the artificial intelligence company OpenAI in 2023 that saw CEO Sam Altman fired and rehired in a matter of days.” I’ve never felt more excited by and also possibly pranked by the premise of a movie before. Are we sure this is real? I have to say, it’s the perfect movie for Guadagnino to direct and it also includes perfect writer and co-producer, Simon Rich — the humorist behind the very Jewish “An American Pickle” and the shows “Man Seeking Woman” and “Miracle Workers.”
I’m already so obsessed with this project, and the fact that everyone’s crush from “Anora,” Yura Borisov, is also signed up to star and possibly play Israeli-Russian co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who led the movement to oust Altman, just feels like the cherry on top of it all.
Barinholtz is the perfect choice to play Musk. He is a master at impressions who got his start at MadTV in the early 2000s. The history buff, who won both the first season of “Celebrity Jeopardy” and “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” — the latter with his father Alan, a lawyer and the secret star of “Jury Duty” as Judge Alan Rosen — also recently starred in Mel Brooks’ “History of the World: Part II” where he played Ulysses Grant, Leon Trotsky, Alexander Graham Bell and Teddy Roosevelt. He’s got the chops to play a very hilarious version of the eccentric tech oligarch.
It’s honestly such a joy to have Barinholtz in any project, but having someone who went to Jewish day school, knows how to blow the shofar, makes very impressive-looking latkes and wrote the joke “mazel brov” for Adam Pally in “The Mindy Show,” play a man whose platform is rife with antisemitism — well, that feels like an extra treat.
