Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for the 1990 film Total Recall.Elon Musk and Vilos Cohaagen are practically the same person. It’s actually harder to spot the differences than the similarities.

Total Recall is a strange film. Depending on how you interpret the ending, this 1990 sci-fi classic is either a film about rebelling against corporate overlords, or a film about escapism… and rebelling against corporate overlords.

In the story, unfulfilled construction worker Douglas Quaid goes to a company called Rekall to get recreational memories implanted. The procedure goes terribly awry, unlocking a deadly alter ego within Quaid who was actually a secret agent with the abilities of an assassin. It turns out that Quaid was basically living in The Truman Show after having his memories erased. Quaid is sent on an epic and ultraviolent adventure to Mars, where he joins the psychic mutant rebellion. Weird enough for you yet?

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Of course, this culminates in a gun fight with our arch villain: Vilos Cohaagen. Cohaagen is the corporate overlord and governor of Mars. Cohaagen’s true intentions are quickly made clear: profit from the turbinium, a fictional ore that fulfills the classic unobtainium trope. Profit and control are the names of the game.

Incendiary real life celebrity Elon Musk is a lot like Cohaagen. Both are ultra-wealthy thought leaders who own corporations, control a worldwide media platform, and want to live on Mars. Even 33 years later, it’s kind of disturbing how similar the goofy dystopian villain of a Schwarzenegger action movie is to one of today’s richest ‘leaders.’

From Total Recall and Mars to Neuralink and Space-X

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Cohaagen is shown to have total control over a privatized medical company called Rekall. Rekall shows some similarities to a real life company owned by Elon Musk called Neuralink. On their official website, Neuralink states that they are “aiming to design a fully implantable, cosmetically invisible brain-computer interface to let you control a computer or mobile device anywhere you go.” The procedure Rekall attempts to perform on Quaid also involves a chip in your head, interfacing directly with your mind.

As governor of Mars, Cohaagen controls the space travel going to and from the planet. Musk’s own obsession with going to Mars was what made him start SpaceX.

Many criticized the race to space between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for being an expensive war of egos. The perception was that these ultra-rich elites were spending hundreds of millions of dollars merely as a contest with each other, rather than spending their fortunes on humanitarian causes. You can find a similar attitude in Cohaagen when he chooses to profit from turbinium ore.

Elon Musk, Twitter, and Apartheid

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For another striking similarity between the two characters, there is Twitter. His purchase of Twitter shows that Musk is very concerned with profiting from (and controlling) the flow of public information. This is an explicit desire of Cohaagen, in both his manipulation of public information, and his weaponization of information against Quaid later in the film.

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Many have argued that Musk’s wealth is built on a foundation of apartheid. The son of entrepreneur Errol Musk, Elon himself called his father “evil.” Even so, Errol’s wealth and financial practices serve as the backbone of Elon’s own casual prejudices and business practices. Similarly, Cohaagen built an empire on the backs of the Martian mutants he is suppressing. A possible byproduct of this upbringing, Musk himself has struggled for years with maintaining personal relationships; in the film, Cohaagen has no relationships at all, and is constantly keeping himself in control of every situation. Profit and control.

Musk Is a Total Recall Villain Without the Genius

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With how eerily similar they are, a better question might be: are there any difference between this fictional villain and his real life counterpart?

Musk has not yet made it to Mars, but this remains his mission with SpaceX project, Starship. Neuralink, however, isn’t looking as optimistic. According to Beth Mole of Ars Technica in February 2023, the U.S. Department of Transportation was investigating Neuralink for transporting hazardous pathogens. The allegation is that “it shipped contaminated implants from the brains of deceased research monkeys infected with multiple types of dangerous pathogens.” It doesn’t look like we’ll be getting memory implants any time soon, but we certainly seem to be living in a Philip K. Dick story.

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Musk’s purchase of Twitter is not going well either. His mismanagement of the media platform have been the source of widespread criticism. It’s becoming easier all the time to find meme’s and jokes poking fun of Musk’s behavior on Twitter, and the platform seems to be tanking. If anything, Cohaagen is a better businessman.

Philip K. Dick and Sci-Fi Tech Billionaires

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Total Recall was based on a story called We Can Remember it for You Wholesale! by the prolific and bizarre Philip K. Dick. His stories have been adapted to such films as Blade Runner, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, not to mention the 2012 remake of Total Recall itself. Dick wrote an atmosphere of paranoia into the story, and that is expressed with the cinematography and soundtrack of Total Recall.

Dick’s own struggles with spirituality, substance abuse, and paranoia find their way into many of his works. By the end of Total Recall, not only is a conspiracy confirmed and thwarted, but reality itself becomes the subject of Quaid’s paranoia. The line between what is real and what is “just a dream” becomes blurred.

The madness continues, and the line between what’s real and what’s fictional is blurred as well. The tech-bro CEOs and billionaires of the world feel like villains straight out of ’80s movies and paranoid sci-fi. The difference is that the real ones aren’t even all that competent, and yet they still succeed. Even with nearly all of his companies tanking, Elon Musk isn’t getting any poorer, or any less influential. A rewatch of Total Recall reminds us that the future is not hard to predict when it’s held in the hands of the ultra-rich.