Key points
Elon Musk biographer Ashlee Vance said that a project based on his book about the early days of SpaceX is dead at HBO.
Entertainment Weekly has learned that HBO passed on the show years prior to Vance’s announcement.
Vance suggested that filmmakers “seem afraid to make something about Elon.”
Another SpaceX project has experienced a failure to launch.
Elon Musk‘s biographer said that HBO is no longer developing a drama series based on his work.
Ashlee Vance, who penned the 2015 book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, said that his unofficial biography “has died” at HBO and will not be adapted into a series there despite being announced in 2020.
However, Entertainment Weekly has learned that HBO passed on the project years prior to Vance’s announcement.
“Well, it’s super sad, but this long-running project with HBO has died,” Vance said on X on Wednesday. “We were going to make a dramatized series about the early days of @elonmusk and @SpaceX. Had some wonderful scripts. They were smart and funny and true to life. I imagine it would have been a massive hit.”
He continued, “Hollywood is hard. And HBO went through too many gyrations for this one to keep the requisite energy.”
Brandon Bell/Getty
Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and lawmakers in the control room of the SpaceX Starship rocket in Brownsville, Tex., on Nov. 19, 2024
Vance also speculated that the entertainment industry is hesitant to dramatize Musk’s life. “People also seem afraid to make something about Elon,” he wrote. “As a result, the IP rights on my biography have reverted to me.”
The author held out hope that another network or studio would consider using his book as the basis for a screen adaptation. “If there are serious offers out there to make something amazing, my mind and inbox are open,” he wrote.
The Musk series was first announced in October 2020, with Star Trek Beyond and Mindhunter scribe Doug Jung attached as a writer and executive producer. Channing Tatum, Reid Carolin, Peter Kiernan, Len Amato, and Vance were also announced as executive producers.
Musk has become a more controversial figure in the five years since the project was announced. The billionaire purchased Twitter and rebranded it as X in 2022, and the platform has seen spikes in hate speech that caused an exodus of advertisers.
Musk also endorsed Donald Trump for the 2024 presidential election and spent over $290 million on the Republican politician’s campaign. After Trump’s victory, he oversaw the Department of Government Efficiency that laid off at least 290,000 government employees.
Musk also received widespread criticism after appearing to make a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration in January, repeatedly villainized transgender people, and stoked controversy with an antisemitic social media post.
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
The SpaceX HBO series was not the only Musk biography project in the works, however. In 2023, Variety reported that Darren Aronofsky was adapting Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of the Tesla CEO. And Ike Barinholtz is set to play Musk as a supporting character in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a biopic focusing on OpenAI founder Sam Altman starring Andrew Garfield.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly