It was probably inevitable.

Knowing the peculiar combination of ego, ambition, brilliance and oddity that defines Elon Musk, it was only a matter of time before he followed in Howard Hughes’ footsteps and got into the movie business

Hughes did it in the other direction. He became a movie mogul before becoming an aviation legend. Musk built the rockets first and is now apparently ready to take on Hollywood.

Hughes had the Spruce Goose. Musk has Starship.

Hughes bought RKO Pictures. Musk has Grok.

Hughes became famously preoccupied with how women appeared on screen, most notably Jane Russell in The Outlaw. Musk’s apparent gateway into filmmaking is an obsession with how Helen of Troy should look.

You really cannot make this stuff up—although Grok soon may.

Musk announced this week that Grok Imagine, xAI’s image and video generator, will produce a full-length version of The Odyssey before the end of the year. According to Musk, his adaptation will be “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”

The announcement followed Musk’s months-long campaign against Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of Homer’s epic. Nolan’s cardinal sin was casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy.

For this, Musk declared Nolan had “lost his integrity.”

Imagine that. Christopher Nolan, the director of Oppenheimer, Dunkirk, Interstellar, Inception and the Dark Knight trilogy, can apparently no longer be taken seriously because he failed to obtain Elon Musk’s approval before casting Helen of Troy.

Never mind that Nolan’s Odyssey earned more than $264 million worldwide during its opening weekend and received overwhelming approval from audiences. Never mind that Nyong’o is an Academy Award-winning actor. Never mind that Helen is a mythological character in an epic poem written almost 3,000 years ago.

Nolan cast the wrong kind of beautiful woman, and for Musk and the self-appointed defenders of the world’s most oppressed minority—white people—that was enough to throw him out of the serious-filmmaker club.

Helen, it seems, has committed the ultimate offense: She was cast without Elon’s permission.

What Exactly Does “Historically Accurate” Mean?

There is something gloriously absurd about demanding historical accuracy from The Odyssey.

This is a story filled with gods, goddesses, witches, giants, monsters, sirens and a cyclops. Odysseus visits the underworld. Poseidon spends years trying to kill him. Athena intervenes repeatedly on his behalf. His men are transformed into pigs. He survives shipwrecks, supernatural storms and nine days drifting through the sea.

But Musk has apparently identified the detail that really stretches credulity: Helen’s skin color.

Homer did not leave behind a modern casting brief for Helen. There is no Pantone skin tone, hair swatch, eye-color chart or Ancestry.com profile attached to the poem. Ancient literary descriptions are poetic, translated and culturally distant from the modern racial categories Musk and his followers want to impose upon them.

Helen was traditionally described as extraordinarily beautiful. That is the characteristic central to the story. She was not handed down through history as a blue-eyed blonde awaiting Elon Musk’s authentication.

There may have been a historical Troy, generally associated with the archaeological site of Hisarlık in present-day Turkey. There may even have been conflicts that helped inspire the stories eventually preserved by Homer. But Helen herself is a literary and mythological figure, presented as the daughter of Zeus.

Zeus has not yet responded to requests for a DNA sample.

For that matter, Helen was said to be from Sparta before Paris took her to Troy, so neither modern Turkey nor modern Greece gives us a simple racial casting formula. Applying 21st-century American racial politics to the ancient Aegean world is not historical scholarship. It is contemporary ideology wearing a toga.

That is what makes Musk’s invocation of “historical accuracy” so telling. This is not really about history. It is about his belief that a cultural artifact has been corrupted by “wokeness” and that he possesses both the authority and the technology to correct it.

I guess in addition to launching 1,000 ships, Helen also launched Elon into orbit. You see what I did there with the SpaceX thing. Leave it in the article.

Grok Goes to Hollywood

Musk says Grok Imagine will create his full-length Odyssey before the end of 2026. The announcement accompanied a roughly three-minute AI-generated demonstration depicting Odysseus and Calypso.

That leaves only the small matter of making the rest of the movie.

We have all watched the rapid progress in AI-generated video. OpenAI’s Sora and competing systems can create remarkable clips. The models are getting better at motion, physics, lighting and maintaining some degree of visual consistency.

But a compelling clip is not a full-length film.

A feature movie requires characters who remain recognizable from scene to scene. It requires narrative continuity, pacing, emotional development, believable performances and a visual language sustained across perhaps two or three hours. It requires something more than a series of handsome shots that vaguely resemble scenes from a movie trailer.

You saw what Sora could do. Need I say more?

Perhaps Grok Imagine has made a giant leap that Musk has not yet shown us. Perhaps it can maintain Odysseus’ face, clothing, emotional state and relationship to every other character across an entire epic. Perhaps it can generate performances comparable to those Nolan can draw from actors such as Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway and Nyong’o.

Or perhaps Musk is once again presenting a technological aspiration as though it were already a production schedule.

Grok can probably make Odysseus sufficiently Nordic for Musk’s tastes. Keeping the same Odysseus recognizable for three hours may prove the greater adventure.

Then there is the matter of compute.

SpaceX has been transforming some of Musk’s enormous AI infrastructure into a compute-rental business. Anthropic gained access to Colossus 1, which contains more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. Google subsequently entered an agreement involving approximately another 110,000 GPUs and related infrastructure.

That is roughly 330,000 GPUs committed to companies whose models Grok is ostensibly competing against. The two arrangements are reportedly worth about $26 billion annually to SpaceX. Reuters reported the Google and Anthropic arrangements, while xAI itself described the Anthropic partnership.

It is difficult to criticize Musk for taking the money. At those prices, Odysseus himself would rent out Ithaca.

Still, perhaps the first challenge in Grok’s version of The Odyssey will be finding an available GPU cluster.

Elon Moves Up the Cultural Stack

The larger story is not that Elon Musk wants to make a movie.

It is that Musk increasingly sees every institution he dislikes as something technology—and therefore Elon Musk—can replace.

He did not merely complain about Twitter. He bought it.

He did not merely criticize the news media. He turned X into his own global publishing and distribution network.

He did not merely object to the direction of OpenAI. He built xAI and Grok.

Now he is not simply reviewing Christopher Nolan’s film or disputing a casting choice. He wants to create the machine that makes Nolan unnecessary.

That is the real ambition embedded in this announcement. Musk does not want Grok Imagine to become one more tool filmmakers can use. He wants Grok to become the studio, the director, the actors, the camera crew, the editors, the visual-effects department and perhaps Homer himself.

This is Musk moving up the stack again.

He moved from electric cars toward controlling transportation. He moved from rockets toward controlling satellite communications. He moved from social media toward influencing public discourse. He moved from GPU clusters toward manufacturing intelligence.

Now he is moving from AI-generated video toward cultural production.

It is another version of the indispensability trap. Owning one layer creates pressure to control the layer above it. Building the infrastructure is not enough. Musk must own what the infrastructure produces, how it is distributed and ultimately what it means.

The destination is not a better tool for Hollywood. It is a version of Hollywood in which Elon does not need Hollywood.

And the dispute over Helen reveals why that should concern us.

Musk is not approaching cultural production as a neutral technologist trying to democratize filmmaking. He is entering it with a specific ideological mission. He believes contemporary Hollywood produces culturally incorrect results. Grok is being positioned as the corrective mechanism—technology that can regenerate culture according to its owner’s definition of truth, beauty and historical authenticity.

Every movie studio has a point of view. Every director makes choices. The difference is that conventional films do not pretend their artistic decisions emerged objectively from a machine.

Musk’s “historically accurate” Odyssey will not be free from bias. It will be filled with Musk’s biases, reinforced through Grok and presented under the branding of technological truth.

That is not history.

It is an algorithmic director’s cut of Elon Musk’s imagination.

The Howard Hughes Phase

The Hughes comparison is funny, but it is not frivolous.

Both men accumulated extraordinary wealth through a mixture of technology, government contracts, personal audacity and an ability to pursue projects that more conventional executives would dismiss as impossible.

Both became celebrities whose personal mythology sometimes threatened to overwhelm their companies.

Both developed an apparent conviction that success in engineering and business qualified them to arbitrate matters far beyond either discipline.

And both reached the point where wealth removed many of the normal constraints that tell the rest of us when an idea may have gone too far.

Hughes did not merely finance films. He intervened obsessively in them. He fought censors. He fixated on actresses and their presentation. He bought an entire studio. Eventually, his businesses, public image, personal compulsions and isolation became inseparable.

Musk is not Howard Hughes, and it would be foolish to pretend their lives are identical. But the movie announcement makes the resemblance harder to ignore.

Musk already has the aerospace empire, the government contracts, the giant experimental aircraft—or rocket, in this case—the movie obsession and the entourage. He also has a social platform that allows him to broadcast every grievance without anyone around him being able to suggest that perhaps Helen of Troy’s hair color is not the most urgent problem facing civilization.

All that remains is the Las Vegas penthouse.

Hughes famously secluded himself on the top floor of the Desert Inn. When the hotel’s owners tried to make him leave, he bought the hotel and stayed. PBS recounts that extraordinary chapter.

Does Musk buy and lock himself away in the penthouse of a Las Vegas hotel next?

If the hotel asks him to check out, history suggests he may simply buy the place.

Before that happens, however, we are apparently getting Elon Musk’s Odyssey: Historically accurate gods, historically accurate monsters, historically accurate trips to the underworld and, above all, a historically acceptable Helen of Troy.

Howard Hughes would understand.