Blah'd Runner: Who's Suing Elon Musk Today?
And the canvassing and voter-bribing isn't going too great either.
No mystery why Elon Musk, world’s most abundant source of bitter-divorced-dad energy, supports Donald Trump! Beyond their shared love for racist conspiracy theories, Musk’s companies account for at least $15.4 billion in government contracts, and also at least 20 investigations over his self-crashing cars and self-exploding rockets. Wouldn’t it be convenient if he could tuck Trump in front of Fox News with a Diet Coke and go regulate himself? The $75 million he’s spent on Trump so far is .03 percent of his personal wealth, couch-cushion change.
So let’s talk about what’s going wrong for him today!
First up, he, Tesla and Warner Brothers are being sued by Alcon Entertainment, the studio that produced Blade Runner 2049 and owns rights to all things “Blade Runner” for copyright infringement and false endorsement, after Elon used an AI-generated re-creation of the self-driving vehicle Agent K (played by a dusty, sweaty Ryan Gosling) cruises around in for a pitch for Tesla’s fug-ass Cybercab. Warner Brothers is included because he streamed the pitch from their lot.
The resemblance could be a coincidence, you might think! Except that Musk asked Alcon for permission to use an image of their vehicle, and they explicitly told him HELL NO. So he scanned the image into AI, and used it anyway!
The lawsuit is full of delicious shade about how Elon is lazy and the studio wants nothing to do with him or his image, saying the stunt “exuded an odor of thinly contrived excuse to link Tesla’s Cybercab to strong Hollywood brands at a time when Tesla and Musk are on the outs with Hollywood.”
And,
Any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account. If, as here, a company or its principals do not actually agree with Musk’s extreme political and social views, then a potential brand affiliation with Tesla is even more issue-fraught. Alcon did not want BR2049 to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.
BURN! And ooh, there’s a “Blade Runner 2099” television series currently in production, and auto-brand affiliation talks are happening right now. So Tesla implying like they have a partnership when they actually don’t is confusing and bad for business.
Blade Runner is based on the classic 1968 Philip K. Dick sci-fi novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (Wonkette commission link!), which is excellent, and if you haven’t read it, you should! It takes place in a then-distant 2021, after nuclear war has destroyed much of life on earth. To encourage people to leave the radioactively poisoned earth and colonize Mars, the world government incentivizes the colonists with their own personal android servants. But some of the android servants escape back to Earth!
The androids (called replicants in the movies) become nearly indistinguishable from humans, and the only way to determine the difference is with an empathy test, which in the 1982 movie is portrayed by Harrison Ford measuring the dilation of Sean Young’s eyeballs, while she slays in shoulder pads and sensuously smokes a cigarette.
Blade Runner’s Earth is supposed to be a dystopia, not an aspiration, but Elon is not the only billionaire who seems to be missing the point. Sam Altman, the cofounder and CEO of Open AI, has actually created an eyeball-scanning orb to prove one’s humanity. Retina scanners aren’t new, but this one is portable and will show up at your doorstep, like Harrison Ford but without any sexy.
Elon’s “X” is also pissing people off with its new terms of service, which include letting your blocked stalkers see your Tweets, and letting X harvest all of your data to help it train AI “on a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free basis.” And if you don’t like it, you can sue them, but only in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts in Tarrant County, where Judge Reed O’Connor happens to own some Tesla stock.
Elon is also in hot water for his PAC’s bribe to swing state voters, in which he offered $47 and and entry into a lottery for a million bucks to anyone who recruits a registered swing state voter to sign an online petition where they assert “I am pledging my support for the First and Second Amendments.”
But oops, federal voting laws prohibit paying people to register to vote, which that sounds an awful lot like. And now former Republican lawmakers, advisers, and Justice Department officials have written a letter asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate if that’s legal.
Also, it seems that Elon’s America PAC has been getting ripped off by the canvassers it hired to doorknock on First and Second Amendment hero Donald Trump’s behalf! The PAC outsourced the job to contractors, and those contractors’ employees have been caught cheating, by using smartphone apps to disguise their locations and lying about their door-knocking numbers. At $20 an hour, can you really blame them?
Maybe he should have used his Optimus android robots! Except, oops, and whew, turns out they aren’t autonomous after all, but remote-controlled by humans, making them technologically closer to the Rock ‘Em Sock Em variety than the smoking Sean Young or somersaulting, thigh-scissoring-your-neck Daryl Hannah kind.
Ah well, guess dystopia will have to wait, for now.
[Alcon v Tesla/ New York Times gift link/ Wired]
Why does Eloon Musk's company have any government contracts? Don't buy his cars and figure out how to have the government take over his rocket company
Ta, Marcie. I think part of the reason for Elon's fanbois' fascination with that sack of excrement is that the name Elon sounds like something from old sci-fi (remember Eloi from The Time Machine?).
I loved reading Philip K. Dick, and I love both Blade Runner (director's cut without the voice over) and Blade Runner 2049. Musk's a phony.