Miles Bron

Miles Bron
Aliases	Son of a bitch Jackass (Both by Benoit Blanc)
Relatives	Unnamed mother Whiskey (former lover)
Physical description
Species	Human
Gender	Male
Height	6'0
Eye color	Blue

"In the real world, you need more than a neat, little detective story. You need evidence. And you’ve got… nothing. Wanna take that to the cops? You wanna take it to the courts? You pick your poison. Anywhere you go, it’s going to be your word against mine. How do you think that’s gonna go? I think it’s gonna go about like it went for Andi." ― Miles Bron bragging about how he will get away with his crimes.

Miles Bron is the main antagonist of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Bron is a rich Tech giant who owns a private estate in Greece. He is portrayed by Edward Norton.

Biography

Miles met Andi Brand and decided to form a company with her. Andi had an idea and Miles helped bring it to fruition. He became friends with her friends along the process. However, he and Andi butt heads after Andi had halted Klear's development for being unsafe. Miles had her removed as CEO. He asked their friends to perjure themselves in court by testifying that Miles single-handedly sketched out the plan for Alpha years ago on a napkin, even though it was Andi. Miles had control over the friends and used money to motivate their lies in court.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Bron invited his closest friends for a getaway on his lavish island for a murder mystery party, with him as the victim. He was surprised when detective, Benoit Blanc, showed up. He was also surprised when Andi showed up because he had murdered her. It turned out to be Andi's twin sister.

After a series of twists, Benoit Blanc realizes Miles was the murderer and his friends slowly realize what kind of person he is and turn on him.

Characteristics

Personality

Miles Bron is an ambitious, iconoclastic, and determined mind, who has never settled for anything less than wanting to be credited for something innovative and revolutionary that would change the world. However, despite this, Miles is a narcissist at his center and puts on a facade to cover up his true personality; childish, conceited, unimaginative, short-sighted, and cowardly.

His ideas have proven to spell volatile consequences for the world and are nonsensical and mindless at best. As such, he has ridden off the coattails of his business partner and Alpha co-founder Cassandra Brand to give off the impression he was a brilliant technological entrepreneur. Miles exerts far-reaching political influence, having won the favor of his friends by bankrolling their careers, and he later uses this as leverage against them in what can only be perceived as an example of moral cowardice. By threatening their careers, Miles compels the Disruptors to perjure themselves in order to protect their interests. Miles' grip over his fellow Disruptors is tight enough that up until his reputation is irreparably tarnished, they refuse to testify against him out of fear of the consequences.

A large facet of his character is that he pretends to be a know-it-all when he really has contributed nothing meaningful and has always stolen ideas from others. He stages delusions of grandeur and radiates a high opinion of himself in order to trick people into thinking he is a complex genius. Miles seems to never have had a fully original idea that he came up with all by himself. To list a few examples; he took credit for the conception of Alpha from Andi; hired other people to do his bidding such as creating the invitation puzzles for his murder mystery party and writing the script for the mystery; he steals the idea from Benoit Blanc to use the island's power outage in order to commit his attempted murder on "Andi", and he is only reminded to burn the evidence of his crimes after Lionel questions why still keep it in the first place.

Furthermore, giving credence to the limit of Miles's imagination and creativity, he is also unintelligent. He makes up words in his vocabulary ("inbreathiate", "predefinite"), or misuses them ("reclamation", "infraction point", "circumspective"), likely in a substantial effort to appear smarter than he actually is. When committing his murder on Andi, he stupidly risked not only using his very expensive and conspicuous supercar as a getaway vehicle for his crime but also staked his entire career murdering someone after a very important court case in the public light.

For a wealthy person, Miles is not smart with his money and can be described as profligate. Adding onto the fact he greenlit an experimental hydrogen fuel, more subtle hints at his wanton spending include making short-sighted investments such as a low-tide dock, and expensive articles of artwork. An example of this is when Miles hangs Mark Rothko's painting "Number 207" upside down, reflecting his superficial appreciation of art. Ultimately, his incessant need to show off and flaunt his flamboyant luxuries also leads to his undoing. He openly discloses the secret to his complicated security system, and this is used to contribute to his downfall later with the Mona Lisa's destruction.

Since he was willing to blackmail his friends and ruin their reputations if they didn't follow his orders, it shows that Miles has a very shallow depth of care for his friend circle and is observed to be very ungrateful. Miles threw Andi under the bus in order to take full credit for her conception of the company and was willing to even murder his other friends if it meant covering up his tracks, just as he did to Duke when he learned of Andi's "suicide”. When he framed himself as the victim, Miles had no qualms about bribing Blanc with "one billion dollars" to let another of his friends take the fall for the alleged attempt on his life, insinuating he would turn on them without hesitation if it meant saving his own skin.

Relationships

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-Andi Brand (Enemy/Former friend) (Deceased)

-Benoit Blanc (Former ally)

-Helen Brand (Enemy)

-Claire Debella (Former friend)

-Lionel Toussaint (Former friend)

- Birdie Jay (Former Friend)

- Duke Cody (Former Friend, deceased)

- Whiskey (Former friend & lover)

- Peg (Former ally)

Quotes

"His dock doesn’t float. His wonder fuel is a disaster. His grasp of disruption theory is remedial at best. He didn’t design the puzzle boxes. He didn’t write the mystery. Et voilà! It all adds up. The key to this entire case! And it was staring me right in the face. Like everyone in the world, I assumed Miles Bron was a complicated genius. But why? Look into the clear center of this Glass Onion... Miles Bron is an idiot!" ― Benoit Blanc about Miles Bron in his denouncement concluding he was the mastermind of both murders.

"Okay, If you wanna shake things up, start by breaking something small, a norm, an idea, a convention, some little business model. You go with things that people are kind of tired of anyway. Everybody gets excited because you are busting things up that everyone wanted broken anyway. And that's... this is the infraction point. Because this is where you have to find it in yourself to keep going, will you break more things and bigger things, and break the thing that nobody wants you to break. At that point, people will stop being on your side. There going to say you are crazy, they will say you are a bully, they'll tell you to stop, even your partner will say that you need to stop. Because nobody wants you to break the system itself. But that is true disruption. That is what unites this group"

Trivia

• "Bron" is a play on the word "Brawn", alluding to the classic "Brains and Brawn" trope; Miles takes all the credit, while Andi is the brains behind the company of Alpha. Miles is also more willing to resort to violence and murder.
• Similar to Ransom Drysdale, Miles Bron is presented to audiences as the most likely killer, but his culpability may be brushed aside on a meta level for seeming too obvious. Unlike Ransom, Miles Bron manages to dissuade both the viewer and Benoit Blanc himself from suspecting him because for Bron to commit murder would have made him a complete idiot: as it turns out, he is an idiot.
• Director Rian Johnson wrote the character as a satire of multiple tech billionaires. Specific references one can identify in the film include:
  • Mark Zuckerberg: Directly referenced with a mention of The Social Network by Lionel: in said film and in real life, Zuckerberg tried to boot his partner Eduardo Saverin off of the masthead of Facebook.
  • Steve Jobs: Miles' black turtleneck in some of the flashbacks scenes is a reference to Jobs' attire. Jobs is infamous for his micromanaging of Apple and taking credit for the work of its engineers such as Steve Wozniak, while himself knowing very little about coding and technical design.
  • Elizabeth Holmes: The image of Miles holding up the napkin is a direct reference to an infamous image of Holmes holding up a Theranos blood test. Holmes, who modeled her public image after Jobs, suffered a fall from grace when it turned out Theranos' blood test did not work as promised, similar to Miles with Alpha and Klear.
  • Elon Musk: Alpha is referenced as manufacturing cars before moving on to space travel, similar to Musk with his work at Tesla before funding SpaceX. Like Miles, Musk was not actually the inventor behind most of the products or companies he is known for, but rather bought out the companies, in Tesla's case suing to be recognized as co-founder.
    • Concurrent to the release of Glass Onion, Musk faced increasing scrutiny over his public image due to his actions following his takeover of Twitter, with both media and viewers finding his actions eerily similar to those of Miles Bron. Johnson admitted that Miles Bron's now-blatant similarities to Musk were a "horrible, horrible accident" but reiterated that Miles is not based on any one particular person.
• A popular theory emerged after the film's release which posited that Miles did not have the actual Mona Lisa in his possession: it was depicted as being painted on canvas (most obvious when it is burning) while the real painting at the Louvre is painted on wood, thus Miles was given a copy without knowing it. Rian Johnson later revealed this was the original plan, having shot an unused mid-credits scene where Benoit Blanc calls the Louvre to confirm the real Mona Lisa was safe. However, he chose to remove the scene as he felt having it turn out to be fake removed the power of the film's climax and Helen's defeat of Miles.
• If one looks closely, they can actually see that the scene of Miles handing Duke the poisoned drink is uncut from the film and in plain sight, further exemplifying the movie's theme of being a "glass onion".
• There are several key differences between Miles Bron and the previous films murderer Ransom Drysdale.
  • Ransom is an unmotivated slacker who's openly rude to everybody, but underneath this persona he hides a devious mind. In contrast, Miles is ambitious to a fault and puts on a friendly facade to everyone he meets, but beneath it all, he's truthfully a corrupt and selfish idiot.
  • Their motives also differ. Ransom, born into wealth, wishes to secure the family fortune so that he can continue living his carefree pampered life. Miles started off as a nobody before getting rich by riding off the coattails of Andi's ideas and wants to maintain his wealth and status so that he can continue pushing boundaries in technology and make himself renowned throughout the world.
  • The methods of murder they employ also greatly differ: Ransom concocts a deviously clever plot to murder his grandfather Harlan and frame Marta for it using a secret trick window on Harlan's mansion, goes largely undetected in his execution of it save for a couple of dogs and his senile great-grandmother, and engages in copious amounts of strategy in order to smooth out the complications that arise to achieve his intended outcome — while Harlan ends up making nearly the same plan to create an alibi for Marta when he commits suicide, he does so after Ransom's plan and is completely unaware of his grandson's machinations. Meanwhile, Miles' murder of Andi is ineptly blunt and direct, to the point that he even uses his signature baby-blue Porsche as his getaway vehicle, is witnessed by Duke as he's fleeing the scene of the crime in said car (his only attempt at obscuring this after the fact is forcing a change of subject when Duke's about to give an anecdote about it), and when it comes time to kill Duke when he attempts to blackmail Miles once the news of Andi's death breaks out, he just hands him pineapple-spiked whiskey in plain view of everyone and just lies very loudly shortly afterwards. He does have a single idea with the panache of shooting Helen with Duke's gun in the middle of his scheduled blackout, but he stole this directly from Blanc's hypothetical scenario earlier in the night. He could have also gotten rid of Duke's phone during the blackout when he was alone, but instead he kept it in his pocket, and thus Blanc is easily able to find it on his person, especially since it was established that he doesn't own a phone.
  • They also react to their downfalls in opposite ways. While Ransom, after an initial failed attempt to murder Marta, goes quietly and accepts his defeat with grace, even giving a small look of respect to Marta, Miles completely breaks down as his entire world collapses and his friends turn against him.