Fresh off securing a potentially $1 trillion compensation package from Tesla shareholders, Elon Musk celebrated this weekend by posting AI-generated videos of synthetic women declaring love - triggering widespread mockery and a literary takedown from 87-year-old author Joyce Carol Oates that cuts deeper than any market analysis.
The world's richest man just had a very public moment with artificial intelligence, and the internet isn't letting him forget it. After Tesla shareholders approved what could become a $1 trillion compensation package, CEO Elon Musk spent his weekend experimenting with Grok Imagine, his company's new AI video generator - with results that sent social media into overdrive.
At 4:20 AM EST Saturday (a timestamp that surely wasn't chosen randomly), Musk posted a video generated entirely by xAI's Grok platform. His prompt was simple but telling: 'She smiles and says, I will always love you.' The result? A synthetic woman on a rainy street delivering those exact words in an obviously artificial voice.
Twenty-four minutes later, he followed up with another Grok creation featuring actress Sydney Sweeney - or rather, a deepfake version - saying 'You are so cringe' in a voice that definitely wasn't hers. The juxtaposition felt intentional, like Musk was having a conversation with himself through AI avatars.
The response was swift and merciless. X users immediately pounced on what many saw as a public display of loneliness disguised as tech demonstration. One user described the romantic AI video as 'the most divorced post of all time,' while another called it 'the saddest post in the history of this website.' The comments section became a digital therapy session nobody asked for.
But the most devastating critique came from an unexpected source: 87-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner Joyce Carol Oates. Responding to Musk's weekend posting spree, the literary giant delivered a observation that hit harder than any stock analysis. She noted how 'curious' it was that Musk 'never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates' - whether friends, family, nature, pets, movies, music, or books.
'In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured,' Oates wrote in what became an instant viral moment. 'The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the most wealthy person in the world.' It was the kind of literary precision that cuts through billions in net worth.
Musk's response was characteristically blunt: 'Oates is a liar and delights in being mean. Not a good human.' The exchange perfectly captured the weekend's surreal energy - the world's wealthiest person arguing with an octogenarian author about the nature of human connection.
