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Washington DC, United States – March 9: Elon Musk, founder and chief engineer of SpaceX, speaks during the … [+]
So Elon Musk is having what the internet might call “normal”. The billionaire Tesla CEO is no stranger to the explosions on social media, but his Twitter feed for the past two days has been exceptional even by those standards. Much of this doesn’t require much of an explanation: He spoke Friday talking about how companies should open despite more risk of coronoavirus to more existential content, saying he was going to sell all of his possessions and that his girlfriend was angry. to the. He also changed his profile picture, which could confuse someone who is not as familiar with video game history.
The game of your profile picture is Deus Ex, released in 2000 by Eidos Interactive and Square Enix. It’s a seminal cyberpunk game and one of the great examples of interactive sims and RPGs, but its setup is probably a bit more relevant here. In it, a conspiracy has launched a man-made plague called the Gray Death as a kind of mass slaughter pandemic, and is using its military might to restrict access to the vaccine.
Deus Ex
It is relevant to our current situation in major strokes, mainly, but also in the more specific notion of a fatal disease that disproportionately affects the already poor.
It is unclear what, exactly, Musk wants to communicate by bringing Deus Ex in an already baffling speech on Twitter, but most on social media have pointed out that he bears some resemblance to the power-hungry billionaire who becomes the game’s main antagonist. Musk recently tried to force his employees to report to work despite the state order to stay home, and has vocally downplayed the seriousness of COVID-19 for months.
In the game, Page’s final plan is to merge with an AI to become some kind of almighty God, which looks like he would be in Musk’s alley. Again, his choice to change his profile picture to plague-oriented fiction doesn’t seem like a coincidence given the current circumstances, but it’s unclear what, beyond that, he’s trying to say.
Tesla shares fell more than 10% at the close of the market on Friday.
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