It will be fascinating to look back and study the arc of Elon Musk. How did one man go from making $175.8 million from the sale of PayPal to founding SpaceX, fathering three children Grimes, and donating to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign while saying Donald Trump shouldn't be the President? Then, finds himself sitting by the President's side as he heads up the Department of Government Efficiency and seemingly bleeds Republican while he wears a black Make America Great Again hat.
Somewhere between all of this, Musk has continued business ventures like the purchase and rebranding of Twitter as X, continued to push forward with Tesla's EV future, and even found time to squeeze in a cameo or two.
Before Musk became quite as a divisive character in pop culture, he stopped by in everything from Iron Man 2 to Machete Kills, The Simpsons to South Park. If playing 'Elon Tusk' in Rick and Morty didn't have you questioning whether we're all living in a simulation, a resurfaced video from 2015 is leaving viewers more than a little perplexed.
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Whatever you think of The Big Bang Theory, it carved itself a popular niche across its whopping 279-episode run.
Landing memorable cameos from Stephen Hawking, James Earl Jones, Leonard Nimoy, and more, it became a cornucopia of tech and sci-fi faces.
Musk famously appeared in 2015's "The Platonic Permutation." Here, Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) met Musk while serving Thanksgiving dinner to the homeless.
In the clip, Howard is star-struck by running into Musk, who is pretty nonchalant about the whole thing. There are jokes about being too generous with the gravy and trips to Mars, but in the comments, plenty are saying that something feels a little off.
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There's been a massive rise in artificial intelligence and deepfakes in the 10 years since Musk appeared on The Big Bang Theory, but rewatching the clip, some are convinced Musk was using it back then.
One skeptic wrote: "There’s something off and weird about Elon’s face and his head movements. I thought this was AI. Is this real? What’s going on here?"
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Another added, "Yeah it’s super weird that it looks AI. Makes me question everything," and a third said, "He just has the same air about him as Mark Zuckerberg. poorly made animatronics posing as humans (jk but they do look like that)."
Someone else shared their concerns that it's getting increasingly hard to tell the difference between what's real and what's not as they concluded: "If one more old man says he can’t tell the difference between AI and real life I’m gonna lose my mind 😵💫."
The world's richest man was later mentioned in a season 10 episode of The Big Bang Theory when Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) discussed Elon's theory that our reality is all part of a video game being played by aliens. In the aftermath of the 'AI Elon' video resurfacing, we're inclined to look into this one a little more.