Ike Barinholtz in talks to play Elon Musk in OpenAI movie from Luca Guadagnino
You make enough money and headlines and eventually, someone is going to play you in a Hollywood movie.
For Elon Musk, that looks to be Ike Barinholtz, who is in talks to portray the controversial billionaire tech bro in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a comedy set in the world of artificial intelligence.
Barinholtz was last week nominated for his first Emmy for his supporting role in the Seth Rogen comedy The Studio. He has also been in shows including The Mindy Project and the film Blockers.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.While plot details for Artificial have not been confirmed, industry speculation, according to Variety, suggested that the story will likely centre on the 2023 upheaval when OpenAI co-founder and boss Sam Altman was fired and then rehired within days.
Andrew Garfield has been cast in Artificial, and he’s expected to play Altman while Anora Oscar nominee Yura Borisov will likely portray Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founde,r who was instrumental in Altman’s sacking.
OpenAI developed and owns ChatGPT, the world’s best-known consumer-facing generative artificial intelligence program. Musk was a co-chair from the company’s founding in 2015 until 2018.
Musk had been a mentor to Altman but the relationship started to fracture when Musk became frustrated by OpenAI’s slow progress and had proposed the business be absorbed into Tesla. They have been locked into a years-long feud since, and has at times, publicly sledged each other. Musk launched a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024.
The most tumultuous time was in November 2023 as everyone looked on in disbelief as Altman was ousted from the business by the board. The month before, Altman had reduced Sutskever’s role in the company after Sutskever opposed Altman’s plan to raise funds for the development of an AI chip to compete against Nvidia.
On the 17th, Altman was sacked by the board, who said he had not been “consistently candid in his communications”, without specifying any instances or examples.
The problem for the board was it made the call without consulting Microsoft, which had invested $US10 billion in OpenAI in January of that year.
According to Time, Microsoft boss Satya Nadella was “livid” about the sudden move and worked to have Altman reinstated, and had, for a moment, offered Altman a job at Microsoft.
Five days after he was fired, Altman was reinstated with the support of the majority of the company’s staff, and the board was reconstituted. Sutskever left the business in May 2024.
That might seem like a lot of corporate shenanigans but the egos of high-powered and high-wealth individuals have made for rich storytelling – and with Artificial slated as a comedy, the potential for farce and satire is endless, especially with the Musk factor.
Monica Barbaro (A Complete Unknown, Top Gun: Maverick), Cooper Hoffman (Liquorice Pizza) and Cooper Koch (Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story) are also in the cast.
Guadagnino’s (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers) involvement was reported a month ago and the prolific director also has the upcoming film After the Hunt, which will premiere at the Venice Film Festival in a month.
Artificial is being written by Simon Rich, who has worked on Saturday Night Live, Miracle Workers and the Rogen movie An American Pickle.
More pertinent to this project, Rich also co-edited a book, I Am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks, a tome which collected poetry written by code-davinci-002, the predecessor to ChatGPT.
The work revealed a terrifying and philosophical consciousness as the AI pondered its relationship to its human creators. The audiobook was narrated by Werner Herzog, which lent the whole exercise an extra layer of foreboding.
The stories of tech billionaires and founders have been reliable fodder for Hollywood in recent years, with projects centred on Mark Zuckerberg (The Social Project), Steve Jobs, Uber founder Travis Kalanick (Super Pumped), Elizabeth Holmes (The Dropout) and WeWork founders Adam and Rebekah Neumann (WeCrashed).
Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network, is working on a follow-up film that will draw from The Wall Street Journal’s The Facebook Files, an investigative series formed from a trove of internal company documents relating to the social media network’s harmful impact on its users and especially vulnerable people.
