Glass Onion: Is Ed Norton's character in the Knives Out sequel actually based on Elon Musk?

You must have thought about it considering it's a notion that all recent movie reviews have posited: is Ed Norton's character in the newly released Knives Out sequel based on Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk?

The Knives Out sequel Glass Onion premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and, since then, Ed's character Miles Bron, a tech billionaire who owns the private Greek island where the movie is based, has been likened to Elon. 

Writer and director Rian Johnson has, however, actually gone on the record disputing the inspiration. 

"When I was writing, I found that any time I started thinking too specifically about any one person, it got very uninteresting, very quickly," Rian recently said to Yahoo Entertainment. "The thing that was more interesting was kind of zooming back and thinking about this general group of people and our relationship to them as a society. We want them to be Willy Wonka. But we want to hurl insults at them, but we also all have this deeply unhealthy thing inside us like, 'Maybe they're actually going to save us.' Or Don't bet against them because what if they're right? So it’s exploring that uniquely American thing of mistaking great wealth for great wisdom. … That more than going after any specific person that I don’t know in real life."

Arguing against any sort of specific relation between his character and real life, Rian specifically called Miles "representative of a species." 

He went on to say, "There are dozens of them. There's a handful that have had documentaries made about their foibles and their excesses and their lies and their self-aggrandizement and their notional talent. Men and women, both, by the way. We're in an era of the rise and fall of [them]. There really are quite few people who contributed quite few details to Miles' make-up." 

But there is much more to the anticipated feature, which just hit movie theaters a few days ago, than potential likeness to any sort of real-life tech guru.

As fans know, the follow-up to the critically acclaimed Knives Out focuses on a group of Miles' friends who are invited to his European island for a week of fun and games, including one that he himself designed in which guests are expected to investigate his staged murder. That's when the only returning character from the original movie makes his appearance: famous detective Benoit Blanc, played by the always wonderful Daniel Craig, who recently broke down in tears during speech as he bid farewell to James Bond, another one of his iconic roles. Needless to say, the detective shows up because there is an actual murder to be investigated amid all the revelry.

Given the success of Knives Out, we expect the sequel to be just as entertaining - whether directly or indirectly making a comment on the billionaire Elon and all that he has come to represent throughout the years.