In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s. It felt at the time that this line risked dating the episode but I don’t think anyone could have expected just how much he would go on trash his own reputation.
The only thing that saves this line is that we found out a few episodes later that the character who spoke it secretly came from the Mirror Universe - where he grew up Musk’s embrace of Nazism was probably seen as a virtue.
In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s.
By a character who was explicitly evil and whose judgement we were not meant to trust, though
In the, admittedly terrible, movie Moonfall (2022) they use his tech and one of the main characters keeps saying things like “God I love Elon”. I guess it was under development in years previous but we long knew that he was a babyish edgelord (see behaviour over the rescue of the Thai soccer team in 2018).
Seems shortsighted to make him such a focus.
i don’t get why they’d do stuff like that in general, you just… don’t fucking refer to living people in media that’s set in the future lol, precisely for this reason!
it’s also kind of cringey to talking about currently living people because it feels like such a cheap grab at being relatable, “ooooo we’re talking about [person who is currently popular], that’s right, someone from your specific time period is relevant in the future!”
the one way you can do it in a decent way is to have it be an offhand remark, and even then you better be quite certain that they’re not going to suddenly start lighting orphanages on fire 5 years after everyone’s seen your production.
