{"id":316358,"date":"2026-05-15T00:58:20","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T00:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/316358\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T00:58:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T00:58:20","slug":"ishmael-reed-is-writing-a-play-about-elon-musk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/316358\/","title":{"rendered":"Ishmael Reed Is Writing a Play About Elon Musk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elon Musk develops 21st-century technologies while pushing 19th-century racial politics. He\u2019s richer than entire countries and yet always hungry for more. He dreams of Mars<\/a> and scorns empathy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s complicated, sure. But can he be art?<\/p>\n

Mr. Musk came to Oakland, Calif., a few weeks ago to crush his nemesis, Sam Altman, the chief salesman for the artificial intelligence boom. As the tech world waits apprehensively for the conclusion of the trial over the A.I. company<\/a> that the tycoons created together, Ishmael Reed is fashioning his own judgment a few miles from the courthouse.<\/p>\n

Mr. Reed, a novelist, playwright and provocateur who has been upsetting opinions across the political spectrum for at least six decades, is aiming high with a new drama. \u201cKing Ludd\u2019s Revenge\u201d is a rare attempt to take on the tech moguls with something more than mere journalism.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of a straight narrative, I improvise,\u201d the 88-year-old writer said. \u201cIt\u2019s like Louis Armstrong singing \u2018Stardust.\u2019 He doesn\u2019t do it the way it\u2019s written.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oakland<\/a> is poorer, Blacker and more maligned than San Francisco and Silicon Valley, both of which are just across the bridges that span the Bay. Having the trial here happened at random \u2014 Mr. Musk\u2019s lawsuit<\/a> against Mr. Altman and the company they founded together, OpenAI, was filed in San Francisco and assigned to the federal court in Oakland \u2014 but feels a little like one of those episodes where the Greek gods descend to mundane Earth to settle a dispute.<\/p>\n

Mr. Reed, an Oakland resident who has celebrated and defended the city for decades, may be the only one in town noticing who\u2019s here. \u201cEverybody\u2019s focused on the N.B.A. playoffs,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n

\u201cKing Ludd\u2019s Revenge\u201d takes its title from the legendary leader of the workers\u2019 revolt in England in the early 19th century. With the ascent of A.I., the Luddites have come back into fashion. The play begins with Mr. Musk receiving a pedicure from a robot. Peter Thiel<\/a>, the tech billionaire who backed President Trump in 2016, bursts into the room. \u201cI think I\u2019ve identified the leader of the Anti-Christ Syndicate,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Mr. Musk: \u201cWho might that be?\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Thiel: \u201cGreta Thunberg.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Musk: \u201cThat girl who leads the environmental movement? That\u2019s ridiculous. The Bible says the Anti-Christ is a beast with seven heads.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Thiel: \u201cShe\u2019s the most prominent head, don\u2019t you see? The heads represent hippies, multiculturalism, identity politics, woke, one-world state, Barack Obama and the 19th Amendment. This is the Beast that decelerated our progress. This is why there has been no cure for cancer or Alzheimer\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adolf Hitler, on a two-day pass from Hell, shows up next. The play is a work in progress.<\/p>\n

If some of this sounds familiar, it\u2019s taken from news accounts. Mr. Reed might improvise, but he also hews closely to what is really happening. He listens to the news all day, starting with an iPad in the living room when he rises at 5:30 a.m. Then he migrates upstairs to a study, where he works under a photo of himself and Malcolm X.<\/p>\n

\u201cNews follows me around the house,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t want to miss anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe loves to fight,\u201d said his wife and sometime collaborator, Carla Blank, who met Mr. Reed in 1965 and married him five years later. \u201cHe\u2019s full of anger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Reed disagreed. \u201cNot anger. Indignation,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s a more civilized way of putting it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Blank, 84, a theater historian and director, introduced Mr. Reed to a format called the Living Newspaper that he found useful. A short-lived federal arts project during the Great Depression, the Living Newspaper aimed to employ journalists and theater professionals to present current events in multimedia form. Among the programs was \u201cInjunction Granted,\u201d which championed workers over capitalists. Republicans gave the Living Newspaper bad reviews, and Congress abolished its funding in 1939.<\/p>\n

Mr. Reed\u2019s most successful play was \u201cThe Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda,\u201d about the beloved musical \u201cHamilton.\u201d Mr. Reed felt the founding father got off way too lightly for owning slaves. The play irked a lot of people, which was fine with Mr. Reed.<\/p>\n

A more recent effort, \u201cThe Amanuensis,\u201d is an examination of the racism in Walt Disney\u2019s notorious 1946 film, \u201cSong of the South.\u201d Mr. Reed and Ms. Blank staged a reading in San Francisco<\/a> last fall. He\u2019s also busy with fiction, poetry and various other endeavors, including a stint as editor in chief of a new magazine, Tar Baby, put out by Toni Morrison\u2019s son Ford.<\/p>\n

At the dawn of the tumultuous 1960s, Philip Roth lamented the difficulty of capturing the outrageousness of American life. \u201cIt stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates,\u201d he wrote. And it\u2019s very hard for a novelist to compete with.<\/p>\n

At this trial, for instance, it was revealed that Mr. Musk had texted OpenAI\u2019s president, Greg Brockman<\/a>, another defendant, during a settlement negotiation. \u201cBy the end of this week,\u201d Mr. Musk wrote, \u201cyou and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you insist, so it will be. Those are lines from a bad screenplay.<\/p>\n

Mr. Reed does not share Mr. Roth\u2019s view that his task is just about impossible. \u201cIt\u2019s such a clich\u00e9, that American life is too bizarre,\u201d he said. \u201cThe job of the artist is to come up with an original angle.\u201d<\/p>\n

It has certainly been his job. Mr. Reed started in the late 1960s writing a series of satirical japes, including \u201cMumbo Jumbo\u201d and \u201cThe Free-Lance Pallbearers.\u201d These books did not sell well at the time but gained a reputation: This is a writer who knows things about America that America would rather you not know. Thomas Pynchon hailed Mr. Reed in his 1973 novel, \u201cGravity\u2019s Rainbow.\u201d \u201cCheck out Ishmael Reed,\u201d Mr. Pynchon advised in a parenthetical aside.<\/p>\n

\u201cIshmael Reed has earned the rare distinction of revolutionizing the way authors tell stories about Black people,\u201d Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, wrote in an email.<\/p>\n

Being a satirist is a complicated business these days, though. Jokes directed at the powerful are dangerous. Mr. Thiel secretly funded a lawsuit against the irreverent website Gawker in 2013. Gawker lost the case and went out of business. (Mr. Thiel did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did Mr. Musk.)<\/p>\n

Mr. Reed is not worried. \u201cI fly below the radar,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Certainly the scales here are unequal. Mr. Musk claims 240 million followers on X, his social media platform, and has a fortune approaching $1 trillion. Mr. Reed\u2019s primary publisher is now in Canada. His biggest asset is his house, which is pleasantly stuffed with books. The street used to have several drug dens; now it is upper middle class.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a Black guy living in North Oakland, writing about titans \u2014 people who live on Mount Olympus,\u201d he said. He listened to some of the trial on an audio feed. He thought of Shakespeare<\/a>, specifically \u201cTitus Andronicus.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat play is about revenge,\u201d Mr. Reed said. \u201cAnd cannibalism. These tech people want to devour each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Altman may be the guy in control of the most significant A.I. company, but Mr. Reed finds him rather flat as dramatic material.<\/p>\n

Mr. Musk is different.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t find him amusing in real life, but he\u2019s amusing in my play,\u201d Mr. Reed said. \u201cI started this because I read that 14 million people will possibly die<\/a> because Elon Musk ended U.S.A.I.D. It took the Nazis maybe five or six years to accomplish that.\u201d Mr. Reed acknowledged that his humor is very dark.<\/p>\n

The writer has no interest in A.I. He uses a grammar program to eliminate extra commas but found that a new A.I.-enhanced version wanted to get creative. \u201cI used \u2018hopped up,\u2019 meaning high on drugs. The A.I. wanted me to use \u2018sedated,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cIt seems intolerant of idioms.\u201d<\/p>\n

(The New York Times sued<\/a> OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)<\/p>\n

In Mr. Reed\u2019s early novel \u201cYellow Back Radio Broke-Down,\u201d a parody of the Old West, a group of wanderers see off in the distance \u201ca really garish schmaltzy super technological anarcho-paradise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most head toward it, and why not? All the comforts and splendors there are free. But some head the other way, toward freedom.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a clue. Like many coldblooded satirists, Mr. Reed has a hopeful heart.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would give the human species 500 more years before they get it right,\u201d he said. \u201cI think we can evolve out of this.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk develops 21st-century technologies while pushing 19th-century racial politics. He\u2019s richer than entire countries and yet always…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":316359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[24012,2080,31569,109597,53529,132331,132333,26065,143,33329,145,144,123391,132332,39120,123392,123397,1058,70931,132330],"class_list":["post-316358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-altman","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-books-and-literature","tag-computers-and-the-internet","tag-elon","tag-high-net-worth-individuals","tag-ishmael","tag-musk","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-calif","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-openai-labs","tag-peter-a","tag-reed","tag-samuel-h","tag-suits-and-litigation-civil","tag-theater","tag-thiel","tag-writing-and-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/316359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}