Elon Musk is behind some of the biggest companies in the world, and those companies have produced technology that really does push past the final frontier. Like SpaceX’s rockets, which can leave the planet, or Starlink’s satellite internet, which can drop an article about whether Elon Musk has a robot girlfriend right on your lap almost anywhere in the world.
But did Musk manage to create a robot girlfriend? Some posters online are claiming he did—though not very seriously. The images behind the claims are clearly not real and nobody’s trying too hard to sell the story.
Musk’s public reputation has recently been defined more by his relentless posting on X after buying and renaming Twitter, as well as a very public political radicalization where he's spiraled deeper and deeper into a swirl of fascistic shitposting and reactionary memes.
But there was once a time when, thanks to his electric car company Tesla, Musk was known as an inoffensive science lord who was going to take humanity to Mars, solve climate change, and spread new technology across the globe—the darling of meme and commodified science lovers across the internet.
And during that time, he also was getting around. Musk is no life-long monogamist. He has 11 known children by three different mothers, according to Business Insider. He was publicly involved for years with the musician Grimes, who he has at least three confirmed children with. Last September she posted, then deleted, tweets begging Musk to see her son. She then sued Musk last October for custody, claiming that he was preventing her from seeing their children.
Musk also had five children with his first wife, Justine Musk, and three children with a Neuralink executive, Shivon Zilis.
But at the beginning of August this year, AI-generated photos and claims started going viral about Musk’s latest supposed flame.
One reel posted on Aug. 8 by @holistic_remedies_9 spread a conspiracy-laden narrative about an AI-generated photo of Musk in a restaurant next to a blond, glossy-faced human head sitting on a robot body, complete with exposed wiring and a shiny chrome exterior.
“They’re saying that Elon Musk actually announced this as his girlfriend,” a man in a video over the explained. “This is an artificial intelligence, for those who can’t see it. This is a pure announcement of transhumanism at its best.”
Alongside Instagram, the photo also spread on Facebook and X, according to a fact check by Politifact.
“Elon Musk has announced his first robot girlfriend, with artificial intelligence. Musk said he took her out to dinner and enjoyed talking to her, calling her smart, beautiful and obedient … Wow this is so crazy!!," a since-deleted Facebook post from Aug. 10 read, captioning the photo #AIGirlfriend, #elonmusk, and #ai, alongside other viral trending hashtags.
Last year, rumors of Elon Musk having a cyborg girlfriend were sparked by AI photos of Musk dancing with and kissing various robot women. The pictures don’t look that realistic, but France24’s fact-checking team devoted a segment to them.
During that round of robot girlfriend rumors, trolls claimed that Musk had actually created a robot wife called Catnilla that is powered by solar energy and never needs to be charged, has positive and negative emotions, and is powered by artificial intelligence.
France24 found that in this case, some of the images were generated by the same guy who prompted images of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket.
In reality, Musk has come nowhere close to inventing any robots, despite pledging that he would. In 2021, his TeslaBot hype presentation was widely panned for featuring a human in a robot suit. However, he said the full robot would be unveiled within a year.
Which hasn’t happened, unless Musk has secretly been keeping it as a girlfriend this whole time.
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