Elon Musk Is Basically a Squid Game Villain, According to the Show's Creator
If the final takeaway from Squid Game is "the rich are done pretending," then yeah — Musk is right on theme.
The third and final season of Squid Game just dropped on Netflix, and while the conversation around it is quieter than Season 1's global meltdown, its creator still managed to stir things up — by comparing Elon Musk to the show's cartoonishly evil billionaire villains.
"Elon Musk is everywhere these days, right? Everybody talks about him," said creator Hwang Dong-hyuk in an interview with Time. "Not only is he the head of a huge tech company that controls the world almost, but he's also this showman."
Hwang admits the show's masked VIPs — grotesquely wealthy, English-speaking elites who bet on human suffering — weren't based on Musk or any single person. But after writing Season 3, he looked at what he'd made and thought,
"Some of the VIPs do kind of resemble Elon Musk."
And in case the metaphor wasn't already blunt enough, Hwang says the VIPs in Season 3 stop watching from behind the curtain and start killing contestants themselves.
"They take their masks off and go into the game and kill others with their own hands," he explained. "The people who really control the power and the system… they no longer hide behind a curtain. They willingly take their masks off, almost as if to declare, 'We're the ones running everything.'"
Sounds familiar.
Meanwhile, Netflix is quietly moving forward with a David Fincher-produced U.S. remake of Squid Game, because nothing says anti-capitalist critique quite like licensing it out to Hollywood for another spin.
As for the finale itself, the buzz isn't exactly deafening. The first season became a cultural juggernaut, but Season 3 dropped after a long hiatus, and reaction's been mixed.
One commenter summed it up: "Just zero interest to dive back in." Another chimed in: "Is this last season a big hit? Not at all being discussed compared to season 1."
Then again, if you've been on TikTok, YouTube, or the Squid Game fan event Netflix just held, it's clearly still in the conversation — just in the oversaturated, fractured way everything is now. The audience hasn't disappeared. It's just harder to hear them over the sound of Elon Musk trying to shoot himself into space while running six companies and tanking Twitter in real time.