The world’s first trillionaire just celebrated his 55th birthday.
And we can’t tell which possibility is more depressing: that his mother used AI to either generate or enhance pictures of him blowing out the candles on a rocket cake made to look like a SpaceX Starship — or that his social media network is convinced it was actually him that posted the slop under his mom’s name.
“Happy birthday to my wonderful son,” the X account of Musk’s mother, Maye Musk, tweeted on Sunday. “Elon Musk has given me 55 years of joy.”
“It’s so much fun to celebrate with family and friends,” the account added curtly, not beating the allegations that a bot had penned the tweet. “His cake is a rocket and a Moon base.”
One of the two pictures shows Musk blowing out candles affixed to the end of a Starship cake, presumably to stand in for burners. The second shows an array of Lego blocks arranged to make it look like an off-planet colony.
As netizens were quick to point out, a hard-to-miss “Made With AI” tag was affixed to the post — before mysteriously being removed — undermining the pictures’ validity, and bumming everybody out even more.
However, we can’t rule out that Musk’s mother used AI to edit the pictures in post instead of generating them from scratch. While there aren’t any obvious signs of the pictures being faked in their entirety — though there’s a hyperreal sheen on the candles photo, and some of the Legos do look a bit garbled — users were left unconvinced.
“I would never understand why making moments like this with AI?” one user replied.
“You made your son’s birthday picture with AI?” another added.
Others were convinced that Musk himself had posted the pictures while masquerading as his own mother, an existing conspiracy theory fueled by a bizarre exchange.
“Oh, no,” one user replied. “That’s not his mum. He owns that account too.”
“Also he controls that account himself lol,” another wrote.
The theory that Musk was puppeteering his own mother’s account flared up earlier this year, following a head-scratching missive.
“Your mom told me she was cleaning toilets in a Liverpool boarding house as a child,” Maye Musk’s account wrote in a since-deleted tweet earlier this year, seemingly referring to herself in the third person, despite ostensibly being Elon’s mother. “When I met her in 1966, she was sewing linings for a furrier in a small windowless room behind the store.”
The tweet caused plenty of confusion, with users pointing out that Musk had already secretly roleplayed as his own toddler son, X Æ A-12, through an alt account.
However, we’re not convinced of the theory, considering that Maye Musk could have been plausibly talking about the trillionaire’s grandmother, not “mom,” and simply mistyped.
Outside of a surprisingly depressing AI-enhanced birthday wish on X, Musk’s big day was overshadowed by a very different kind of controversy. The richest man in the world has spent much of the last week defending himself after being accused of murdering millions through his careless dismantling of USAID — an effective death sentence for some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.
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