SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has done the ‘real’ Iron Man several favors
“Iron Man” and “Iron Man 2” director Jon Favreau explains on Recode Decode.
Savvy techies may have noticed, in 2010, that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had a cameo in “Iron Man 2” as a spectator at the Monaco Grand Prix, pictured above. But Jon Favreau, who directed the first two films in the series, said Musk’s involvement in the films goes further than that.
“It’s not based on him, it’s based on the comic book,” Favreau said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “But Robert Downey, when we were prepping ‘Iron Man,’ said, ‘There’s somebody we should sit down and talk with.’”
“[He] said, ‘This is a guy who can give us some insight into what it’d really be like to be Tony Stark.’”
Hence why Musk’s short cameo, embedded below, includes a little banter between him and Downey’s Tony Stark character about working together on an electric jet.
Favreau said after the initial sit-down for “Iron Man,” he stayed friends with Musk.
“‘Iron Man 2,’ we filmed at SpaceX,” he said. “He let us film there for free. He’s been a very good friend of the Marvel family there, and we’ve maintained a friendship with him.”
To hear the rest of Favreau’s interview with Swisher, in which he talks about films like “The Jungle Book” and his new virtual reality project “Goblins & Gnomes,” you can listen in the audio player above, or subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn and Stitcher.
And in case you missed it back in May, check out the full video of our interview with Musk from the 2016 Code Conference.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
