With the week he's had, it's no surprise that folks are starting to compare billionaire genius industrialist Elon Musk with that famous character from the superhero universe boasting similar credentials, Tony Stark, otherwise known as Iron Man.
For starters, Musk's commercial spaceflight venture SpaceX successfully launched its Dragon capsule into orbit on Tuesday, sending it on its way to a first-ever rendezvous between a privately built spacecraft and the International Space Station. Hours later, the South African entrepreneur's other futuristic business venture, Tesla Motors, announced it will be shipping its Model S electric sedans to customers starting next month.
Musk-as-Stark is the premise of this Los Angeles Times article by Tiffany Hsu. Her argument for the 40-year-old PayPal co-founder's coronation as the closest thing we have to a real-life Iron Man is so clear-cut that to be honest, we're a little miffed that we didn't think to make the case first.
"Tony Stark, alias Iron Man, is suave, brilliant, mega-rich and dripping with beautiful women. Sounds an awful lot like Elon Musk, the South African entrepreneurial wunderkind who spent his Tuesday shooting a rocket into space and making a major advance in electric vehicles," Hsu writes.
Plus Musk helped inspire the characterization of Stark by Robert Downey, Jr. in the Iron Man and Avengers movies, according to no less an authority than director Jon Favreau, Hsu points out.
Case closed, right? Not so fast. Gizmodo spoiled the fun Wednesday by reminding us of Emile Leray, the French motorist who actually approximated the Iron Man origin story in the Sahara Desert back in 1993.
That's when Leray's Citroen 2CV broke down miles from a civilized outpost. Whereas most people would sit there wishing satellite phones had been invented, this enterprising fellow decided to tear apart his car so as to turn it into a post-Apocalyptic motorcycle (see picture below) that he throttled up and rode out of the desert. The full account (in French) of how he pulled it off is here.
If you recall the first Iron Man film, Stark only built the Iron Man suit because he had been captured by a rebel warlord in Afghanistan (Tony's captor was the supervillain Wong-Chu in the original comic book) who forced the genius inventor to build him cutting-edge weapons. Instead, an injured Stark used the primitive tools and parts he was given to build a contraption that stabilized his wounded heart and then created a makeshift suit of mechanized armor to bust out of captivity.
To paraphrase Hsu, sounds an awful lot like Emile Leray.
But the story isn't over, because all of this got us thinking that Tony Stark has another trait in addition to his brains, bank account, boldness, and ingenuity in a jam. He's also a notorious boozer and a jet-setting playboy.
Musk and Leray each possess eerily Stark-like qualities, but until either man can show us the $100,000 bar tabs that prove their dilettante bona fides, we're going to nominate a third candidate for the Real-Life-Tony-Stark sweepstakes: Eduardo Saverin.
For more from Damon, follow him on Twitter @dpoeter.
