“Ike is going to kill this in a way Elon is not going to like”: Ike Barinholtz was just cast as Elon Musk in Sam Altman biopic “Artificial”

The Studio star Ike Barinholtz will play controversial billionaire Elon Musk in the Amazon film on Sam Altman’s brief firing from OpenAI. T

What we know about Artificial

Artificial is currently in development by Amazon MGM Studios for Prime Video. The film is about that Thanksgiving weekend in 2023 when OpenAI’s board decided to remove Sam Altman as CEO. They claimed on November 17 that the tech billionaire was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board” in their “leadership transition” announcement.

For the next three days, Altman negotiated his way back into OpenAI with the help of many employees, who threatened to leave for Microsoft unless the board reinstated him. On November 20, Altman returned and most of the board resigned.

Amazon’s $40 million feature film will portray this battle with Luca Guadagnino directing and Andrew Garfield playing Altman. Garfield’s girlfriend, Monica Barbaro, will play OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and Yura Borisov will portray chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.

The movie is to be a comedic drama, which is Barinholtz’s specialty.

“Levels of ‘going for it’ we haven’t seen in ages”

Barinholtz made his name in the comedy genre over the last two decades. He started in MADtv and worked his way to comedy dramas like Snatched and Late Night. Most recently, he earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for his role in the satirical series The Studio by Seth Rogen.

The role of Elon Musk could be a challenge for this actor with the billionaire’s reputation of being chronically unfunny in spite of his best efforts. This left some users of his platform uncertain over the casting.

“The problem with casting naturally funny charismatic people as Elon (cf Cory Michael Smith) is that they read as overly warm,” warned @goldman.

“They should have gone with an AI-generated CGI Elon Musk, just to maximize the meta-commentary aspects,” said @markyzaguirre.

Recent controversies around Musk also left the door wide open for people to make jokes at his expense.

“To prepare for his role as Elon Musk, Barinholtz will be doing a f*** ton of ketamine and tweeting whatever the fuck he can think of,” wrote @GummyBeatsLIVE.

Others were excited by the idea of Barinholtz as Musk, finding it a perfect match.

“We’re about to see levels of ‘going for it’ we haven’t seen in ages & I’m so in,” said @ahscherer.

“Ike is going to kill this, in a way Elon is not going to like, yet will be 100% accurate lol,” wrote @ericbaber87.

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