Featured Image Credit: Slaven Vlasic / Stringer / Netflix / YouTube
If you watched Netflix's Leave the World Behind this weekend, you may be wondering what Elon Musk thought of THAT scene.
We're talking of course about the new apocalyptic thriller from award-winning director Sam Esmail, who also created hit TV series Mr. Robot.
With a star-studded cast that includes Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali and Ethan Hawke, the film dropped on the streaming giant on 8 December and has already been receiving rave reviews.
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But maybe not so much from Elon Musk who has seemingly responded to a scene from the film that appears to poke fun at his car company, Tesla.
The film tells the story of a family trying to flee the madness of the supposed end of the world, including a series of wildly catastrophic tech blackouts.
And one scene has gotten people talking, and now appears to have caught the attention of the world’s richest man, because it takes a swipe at his firm’s tech-loaded electric cars.
It involves a highway pile-up which the family soon realise is actually all made up of empty, white Tesla Model 3s.
It turns out the luxury electric cars - which come with a self-driving feature - are all effectively self-destructing because of a mass power outage in what many see as a joke at the expense of Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot feature.
But the Tesla boss hasn’t seen the running side, replying to a snippet of the film posted to X by Netflix by saying: “Teslas can charge from solar panels even if the world goes fully Mad Max and there is no more gasoline!”.
Some pointed out that Musk appeared to be missing the point of the scene, which was not that Teslas were lacking power or needed to start, its that they can self-drive and couldn’t be stopped.
But also, just how did they pull off that scene in the film?
Well, the film's picture car coordinator Robbie Griffin is reported to have scoured for as many damaged models of the car that he could secure, and then also rented a few for the shoot, with additional shots filled in by VFX.
The billionaire’s apparent inability to take a joke comes as he finds himself also seemingly well and truly roasted by Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot he launched on Friday for the platform’s premium subscribers.
It looks like the sarcastic chatbot has a sense of humor - calling the Tesla titan “a giant man-child”.
At least this is according to Aravind Srinivas, the co-founder of Perplexity AI, who asked Grok to roast its creator based on his X posts.
