Elon Musk pops in at ‘Fallout’ pop-up at SXSW

Jordan Hoffman
·3 min read
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Elon Musk, the controversial leader of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly known as Twitter), and, let us never forget, “The Boring Company,” made a rare appearance at a Hollywood function on Thursday night. The Future King of Mars landed at an SXSW promotional activation for “Fallout,” the new Amazon Prime Video science fiction series executive produced by Jonathan Nolan.

It isn’t too shocking to see Musk at a SXSW event. While he famously has no fixed address (much to the chagrin of his baby mama, Grimes), he does maintain a post office box in Lakeway, Texas, which is about a 45-minute drive from Austin. Furthermore, SXSW has always been a safe space for “disrupters,” and maintains a bit of a Libertarian streak. (Indeed, it was just a year ago that Joe Rogan transformed Austin’s downtown theater, the Alamo Ritz, into an anti-woke comedy club.) 

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But it is a little surprising that Musk would go cheerleader mode for something streaming on Amazon, what with him and Jeff Bezos as dueling space explorers, but Deadline notes that the South African-born tech zillionaire is, in fact, chummy with Nolan—indeed the two shared a Q&A at the festival in 2018. 

Whether or not Musk is also friendly with Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan’s brother, is unknown—and surely Universal’s publicists are happy to keep it that way at least until after “Oppenheimer” picks up some Oscars this weekend. (Musk does tend to say some controversial things on X from time to time.)

Anyhow, Musk strolled into the activation, shook some hands, had a drink, poked around with some of the props/video games while “Groove is in the Heart” by Deee-Lite played on the PA, and seemed to be having a good time.

“Fallout,” based on a video game series going back to 1997, debuts on April 12. Nolan and his longtime associate Lisa Joy are credited as developers on the series (and Nolan directed the first episode), but Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner are the showrunners. It stars Ella Purnell, Kyle McLachlan, Walton Goggins, Aaron Moten, Leslie Uggams, Chris Parnell, Sarita Choudhury, and others. The game’s setting is in a post-apocalyptic dystopia with a retro-future look. It is a golden time for video games and prestige TV, with “The Last of Us” winning eight Creative Arts Emmys at HBO and “Halo” wrapping up its second season at Paramount +. (Maybe now, finally, someone will put some respect on Q*bert’s name.)

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