Squid Game Creator Says Some Of The Show’s Worst People Remind Him Of Elon Musk

Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has always maintained that the psychological thriller series is more than gore porn; it’s a commentary on the social and economic inequalities of the world we live in. When you aim to mirror the darkest impulses of mankind, naturally, some real-life terrible people will stumble into the reflection. In a recent interview with Time, the brilliant creator explained how, as he sees it, some of the worst people in the show are similar to Elon Musk.

There is no morality scorecard in a show where life or death is the literal result of playing games, but if there were a ranking of the worst people on the show, then the snobby VIPs of the game would be right below the people who run it. In the show, the gruesome struggle for survival is a spectator sport in which The Front Man and the competition operators allow a select group of rich, masked douchebags to watch the games on television screens—like a sports bar for the perverse.

In Season 3, the sadistic voyeurism goes to scarier depths when we find out some VIPs are given the chance to dress up as guards and execute contestants who didn’t finish the game properly. These are the people who personify the term “insanely rich.” Dong-hyuk said those people share a connection with one of the richest men in the world.

“Everybody talks about him. Not only is he the head of a huge tech company that controls the world, almost, but he’s also this showman. After writing [Season 3], of course I thought, ‘Oh, some of the VIPs do kind of resemble Elon Musk.’”

This isn’t the first time he’s noted the parallels between his imaginary class of elitists and the ones all over the news. In a 2021 interview with IndieWire, released a month after Squid Game premiered, he said President Donald Trump reminded him of one of the VIPs in the first season because “it’s almost like he’s running a game show, not a country, like giving people horror.” He told Time years later that the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol “was also part of the current events that inspired me.”

Truly, these are the reasons shows like Squid Game draw massive audiences. Economic imbalances afford certain groups of people the ability to watch those less fortunate desperately fight and kill for resources others have in abundance, resources they can frivolously spend on things like kicking back and taking in this brutal spectacle. Squid Game is far from a documentary, but as Dong-hyuk has all but admitted, it is a product of its time.