July 23, 2025 Ike Barinholtz has been cast as Elon Musk in Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming OpenAI movie, Artificial, reports Matthew Belloni of Puck News. Barinholtz, mostly recently known for his role as Sal Saperstein in The Studio, joins Anora breakout Yura Borisov, Andrew Garfield, and Monica Barbaro in the Amazon MGM Studios film, which was penned by Simon Rich. Musk was an early investor in OpenAI before launching his rival company, xAI. As Belloni previously reported, he is a minor character in the movie, who mostly serves as “comic relief” in a few scenes where he is “more concerned with his (malfunctioning) driverless Tesla than the prospect of uncontrolled AI destroying the world.” Related Video Drawing comparisons to The Social Network, Artificial is set in the tumultuous five-day period in 2023 when Sam Altman was fired, then rehired as the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT. According to Belloni, the film’s story revolves around OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever (Borisov) and his betrayal at the hands of Altman and Silicon Valley. Advertisement “The script is pretty much in line with what you might expect Hollywood to do with the OpenAI origin story: a straightforward indictment of the reckless culture behind the commercialization of artificial intelligence, as well as a drive-by hit on Altman, who is depicted as a liar and a master schemer,” Belloni wrote in a report published earlier this month. Other key figures in the film include OpenAI’s former CTO Mira Murati (played by Barbaro) as well as Dario Amodei, the company’s former VP of research who left to become CEO of rival Anthropic, current OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Microsoft CEO and key OpenAI backer Satya Nadella, former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and former OpenAI board members Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner. Artificial is planned for a 2026 release. The role of “Elon Musk” has been cast in the big OpenAI-Sam Altman movie starring Andrew Garfield from Amazon Studios. Elon will be played by….wait for it…Ike Barinholtz (Sal Saperstein from The Studio). Advertisement