What Prometheus’ alien reboot did right and wrong about Elon Musk

On February 28, 2012, a video titled “TED Conference, 2023” appeared on the website of the American-Canadian non-profit organization of the same name. The fake, futuristic presentation was the start of a viral campaign for Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s then-upcoming attempt to revive the sci-fi horror of the Alien franchise with a high-spirited prequel. But the video turned out to be a strange foreshadowing in itself.

Written by Prometheus Co-written by Damon Lindelof and directed by Ridley’s son Luke Scott, the video starred Guy Pearce as a younger version of his character Peter Weyland, the film’s alleged antagonist, who delivered a defiant speech to a huge Wembley Stadium audience that was in limbo Cameras and real-time reactions running across a giant projection screen. Before PrometheusWeyland was the previously unseen (and long-dead) founder of Weyland Industrieswhich eventually became the ruthless mega-corporation Weyland-Yutani (aka “The Company”), first seen in the 1979 original extraterrestrial. But in TED Conference, 2023, Weyland is alive and well, a 32-year-old tech mogul and true industry titan at the peak of his combined wealth, youth and power with clear thoughts about the future.

“Prometheus It’s set in the future, but it’s a movie about ideas, and I just felt like it would be really cool if one of the characters from the movie gave a TED talk,” Lindelof said in one Q&A interview posted on TED’s blog along with the video by Peter Weyland. “Since the film is set in the distant future, it obviously needs to be a little more contemporary. But wouldn’t it be cool if it was a TED Talk from a decade in the future? And what will a TED Talk look like in 10 years? And what would this guy have to say?”

Peter Weyland’s TED Talk is just one example of how the inexorable passage of time has eclipsed the wildest predictions of speculative fiction. In 2023, however, the most interesting thing about the video isn’t its thematic or narrative relationship to it Prometheusbut as it stands as an unintended time capsule of a moment in our collective culture when tech CEOs held a much higher profile overall.

To say that 2012 was a different time than 2023 is to say that the moon is a different place than the earth. The first black president of the United States was re-elected; Disasters and crises, both natural and man-made, such as Hurricane Sandy and the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, shook the nation; And The Avengers became one of the highest-grossing films in history – a record that would be eclipsed by Marvel itself on numerous occasions over the next decade.

Image: Marvel Studios

However, the most relevant milestone of this year concerns the Prometheus TED Talk Video, is the rising popularity of Elon Musk, who debuted on Forbes’ list of the world’s billionaires in March 2012 with a net worth of about $2 billion. In the late to early 2010s, Musk was Silicon Valley’s golden boy, the “cool” billionaire who loved video games and Rick and Morty and inspired Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark in 2008 iron man. He was the man who wanted to bring humanity to Mars by 2021and the subject of countless glowing profiles and commentaries by the likes of Esquire, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and more proselytizing “triumph of his will” and his status as a technician most demanding bachelor.

In 2023, Elon Musk is Silicon Valley’s richest pariah, a man that was booed on stage at a comedy show and then went to his mob pulpit on the social media platform he bought to boost his self-esteem and explained: “Technically it was 90% cheers and 10% boos.” A man suspected of being one of the inspirations behind Edward Norton’s character in Rian Johnson’s 2022 crime thriller glass onion, a peacock-like tech billionaire with delusions of grandeur (and a possible homicidal bent). A man who posts terrifying dad memes and dog whistle conspiracy theories when he’s not busy Bans and avoidance of journalists, Boosting his own tweetsor Live streaming of fart sounds at 2 a.m

In 2012, Damon Lindelof envisioned a character who was one of the richest and most powerful men alive, a multi-billionaire who emerged from a self-imposed three-year media blackout in the then-futuristic year of 2023 to thunderous applause before becoming stupefied with the Greek mythology, the history of human technology, and the folly of institutional regulation. In the reality of 2023, we’ve gotten to the point where we’re practically begging one of the richest men in the world to please unsubscribe and shut the fuck up.

Musk, as my colleague Susana Polo would put it, is a man who “wants to do what he wants, fundamentally […] wants to be worshiped to be the guy who can do whatever he wants.” Both he and the fictional Peter Weyland have so much in common. As revealed in the last act of PrometheusPeter Weyland funded Elizabeth Shaw’s (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway’s (Logan Marshall-Green) expedition to LV-223’s distant moon so that he could meet the Engineers – the advanced alien species believed to have destroyed humanity and the planet Xenomorphs – could ask for help a cure for death so he could live forever. No spoilers, but… Well, you can imagine how well this plan worked out.

History (speculative or otherwise) aside, that Prometheus The viral marketing campaign remains a fascinating touchstone of sci-fi popular culture and Hollywood ephemera, with the campaign’s boldest element being the Peter Weyland TED Talk. It’s more than worth revisiting, if not to make clear how the portrayal of tech CEOs has or hasn’t evolved in our collective culture, then just to see how Guy Pearce as Weyland in in all its boastful splendour.

Prometheus is available for streaming Hello.