The parallels between Musk and Stark seemed perfect on paper. Both are billionaire tech innovators with a flair for the dramatic and dreams of changing the world.
The parallels between Musk and Stark seemed perfect on paper. Both are billionaire tech innovators with a flair for the dramatic and dreams of changing the world.
They’re not, though. Stark is a rare engineering powerhouse who personally pushed past a lot of engineering boundaries, and Musk is an investor/programmer who mostly puts his name on existing things.
I might change my mind if Musk personally invents AGI, nanobots, and a previously-unknown clean energy source capable of powering a 1/3rd of NYC with a room no larger than a foyer, like Stark did, but I’m not holding out much by way of hopes.
Considering he asked twitter programmers to print out their pull requests Im not even sure he’s not cosplaying a programmer
Wow I hadn’t heard about that.
Did he want them faxed to him?
When he apparently was a programmer, this was a bit more normal.
I’ve met a few professors requiring uni assignments’ code printed.
When he wrote code at PayPal, people kept having to go back and fix it. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.
OK. I just meant that one can demand that as a sign of respect or something. With a sufficient degree of narcissism.
I imagine that a university level coding assignment and the backend code that runs the Twitter.com website (albeit just fractions of it) are several orders of magnitude apart from each other in terms of size and complexity. I don’t know shit about programming though, I took C++ in high school and got a D+. Should’ve called the class Introduction to D++.
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And yet
Back in 2016, Iron Man director Jon Favreau revealed that Musk had been a direct inspiration for their version of Tony Stark. Downey Jr even spent time with Musk to better understand what it would be like to walk in the shoes of a real-world tech mogul.
Hey vocal.media why not proofread your articles a little better? The first letter is a typo, never seen that before.
Un an interview that’s got everyone talking, Robert Downey Jr has finally addressed the elephant in the room; those persistent comparisons between Elon Musk and the character Tony Stark.
Elon Musk is a wannabe fanboy of Tony Stark, per Iron Man 2. It’s MCU canon.
From the article:
Back in 2016, Iron Man director Jon Favreau revealed that Musk had been a direct inspiration for their version of Tony Stark. Downey Jr even spent time with Musk to better understand what it would be like to walk in the shoes of a real-world tech mogul.
When Stan Lee created Tony back in the 1960’s he probably took his inspiration from Howard Hughes.
Hughes had been the inspiration for a famous novel of the time, “The Carpetbaggers.”
HH was played by Leo DiCaprio in ‘The Aviator.’
If you watched agent Carter, Howard Stark is clearly just Hughes by a different name.
Doc Savage has entered the chat.
Millionaire geniuses were a dime a dozen in the Pulp Era!
[jk, of course you’re right]
Clicks link
The very first word in the article is a glaringly obvious fucking typo. Why on earth would I want to read anything that website has to say?!?
Yoi jist don’t inderstand modern artucles?
Tony Stark created likeability with a box of scraps in a cave!
Well he’s not Tony Stark…
Are people ready to admit that characters like Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne has always served to propagandize the idea of “genius millionaire/billlionaire” capitalists despite the fact that no such thing has ever existed in reality?
And that this propaganda is partly the reason why parasitic fraudster racketeers like Musk, Gates and Bezos gets to get away with their gargantuan crimes against humanity?
No?
are you ready to admit that fictional characters exist in fiction because it gives an escape to readers to fantasize about themselves as the hero?
get over yourself bringing all that hatemongering in here.
you think you offer a special perspective that none of us have that pertains to the widening of socioeconomic gaps between the rich and poor? yeah we get it, “rich man bad!”
calling comic book characters propaganda, what’s wrong with you?! you think the writers of these characters have some kind of secret cabal where they purposely write great things about rich people just to make actual rich people look good?!
your perspective is skewed and you need to re-evaluate it.
It isnt so much direct propaganda as conditioned propaganda. Stan Lee was a playwright for the us army a title I believe less than 10 people held at the time. He spent his late teens and early 20s being the hand on the page for the voice of the US government. Being immersed in those ideals it is no wonder he regurgitated us red scare propaganda and he expressed regret for it.
This didnt stop though and with iron man stan lee said:
“I think I gave myself a dare. It was the height of the Cold War. The readers, the young readers, if there was one thing they hated, it was war, it was the military. So I got a hero who represented that to the hundredth degree. He was a weapons manufacturer, he was providing weapons for the Army, he was rich, he was an industrialist. I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him … And he became very popular.”
Prpaganda is defined as
“deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist”.
Iron man certainly seems to fit. Remember Stan Lee was in the military when it was antifascist. As a result he was pro military and he used his position to sway people toward his own views which… were developed when writing for the army. …
It doesn’t have to be a secret conspiracy to act as propaganda. Social conditioning reinforces it. Americas civil religion permeates every aspect of life from the pledge of allegiance in kidnergarten to the anthem at ball games. If you do not recognize it and challenge it you will repeat it.
I personally think in the case of Batman it was less nefarious. A plot device gone awry. After all, how could a normal man compete with Superman? In our society he would have to be rich to fund his inventions and afford superhuman tools.
I generally agree with your post, but I’d say one correction is in order here.
Remember Stan Lee was in the military when it was
antifascistpretending to be antifascist in order to wage war on colonialist rivals.The US military has never been antifascist.
Yeah I guess I should have said ‘actively killing fascists at the time’
I think there’s some kind of general fascination with rich people ingrained naturally in the human mind. It’s not just in comics. It’s present in many fairy tales, mythology, religious books…
Iagree it can help the rich to get away with things. But I also think it’s not fair to blame authors for using good old archetypes, while I also support kindhearted critique of those archetypes - it’s important to understand their role in social context and to make authors aware of the downsides.
gives an escape to readers to fantasize about themselves as the hero?
Your “escapist” fantasy is to be rich, dress up in tacticool BDSM-gear and be allowed to beat up working class people?
Yes, comic books are propaganda, and the super-creep variety has always had the smell of Objectivism to it.
It’s certainly worked on you.
Sure but sometimes the times makes certain types of escapism unattractive and not fun. The idea of a good guy billionaire is not fun in 2024
It’s not fun in 2024 because, thanks to the internet, we now have mountains of evidence at our fingertips to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt what they really are and always have been - ie, what the leftists have been trying to tell us since forever.
Can you imagine how much good he could have done, had Bruce Wayne donated all that money to school programs, while he became a politician who helped by providing services to the city.
I remember reading Kingdom come, and Batman is a fascist by then. Old and crippled and wearing an iron man style suit. But the actual Gotham city is now monitored by bat robots who watch everyone and keep them in line.
and Batman is a fascist by then.
I’d say that Batman is fundamentally fascist. He wages war on the working class so that crime can be preserved as an activity reserved for the class Bruce Wayne represents - the capitalist one.
Elon wants to be Stark. He’s actually Iron Monger. He wants to be Stark so fucking badly.
From the article:
Back in 2016, Iron Man director Jon Favreau revealed that Musk had been a direct inspiration for their version of Tony Stark. Downey Jr even spent time with Musk to better understand what it would be like to walk in the shoes of a real-world tech mogul.
“This is what rich guys act like”
“Oh, except you’ll be playing one who is actually quite intelligent”
You call them both innovators.
What has Musk innovated?
Buying other people’s ideas doesn’t count.
His cameo in the 2nd Iron Man movie always felt so cringey to me. I don’t know how it came about, but I like to imagine Musk asked the production for the role. It is so clear to me that he desperately wants to be seen as the man who will single handedly save the world. His companies do incredibly impressive things, I cannot discredit the work of SpaceX, but the more he speaks, the more I am convinced that he is just an egomaniac cosplaying as a genius.
I don’t know how it came about
iirc the facility that we see housing the evil iron man ripoff suits was a SpaceX facility irl
Iron man 2 was filmed at SpaceX
Well, Stark is actually a fictional character in a genre that too often uses the term “smartest X alive” when that’s not how intelligence works at all. Also, like others have said, Howard Hughes is more likely the inspiration for Stark. That being said, the closest irl “tech savant” I can think of is John Carmack.
I vote John von Neumann for tech savant.
There’s a long list of historic examples of people who actual are what the techbros fantasy about being. I was limiting myself to living examples of people who were just interested in the tech. Carmack’s comments when he left facebook was fun to see. I always thought he was better then that company.
You could even put Ben Franklin as a tech savant of his time. While also being an influential person on the world stage and helped found a country at that.
Who cares. How is this news?
Tesla’s CEO; The Inspiration For Tony Spark
Elon “Baby-Brain” Musk as the inspiration of “Tony Spark” the cheap knock-off Tony Stark.
Tony Stark first appeared in Marvel comics 8 years before Musk was born.
Yet he shook Elon’s hand on screen in iron man 2, solidifying that misconception. So I guess he’s cleaning up his own mess
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