(Credits: Far Out / Forever 27)
Mon 8 December 2025 4:00, UK
The White Stripes’ breakout success in the early 2000s only predated the arrival of social media by a couple of years, but that tiny gap wasn’t insignificant.
As a band partly founded on the idea of crafting a very particular image and mythology, the whole mystique might have gone up in smoke had the investigative sleuths and conspiratorial trolls of Musk-Twitter been there to pounce on them at the time.
Of course, even the simpler, friendlier internet of 2002 did eventually discover the hidden truth behind Jack White and Meg White’s supposed siblinghood, unearthing an old marriage certificate that revealed the pair’s actual, real-life history together as husband and wife. Jack and Meg’s little white lie was ridiculed by some and hailed by others for its brazen zaniness. Harmless as it may have been, though, it did open the door for some additional suspicion around anything the duo said or did going forward.
Rather than set the record straight, naturally, Jack and Meg only stirred the pot further. They doubled down on espousing the sister-brother narrative even after the marriage certificate surfaced online, and when that wasn’t working, they’d try something slightly more ridiculous. One such quip, supposedly delivered by Jack White at some point in 2002, suggested that his sister or ex-wife Meg might not actually even be a human being, but a drumming robot created in some Detroit cybernetics lab.
The internet, cheerily, gobbled up this new concept with delight, with at least one blogger pushing all his chips into the “Meg White’s a Robot” basket, theorising that the original, real Meg had been killed in a car crash some time after the band’s 2001 album White Blood Cells, and had since been clearly replaced by an android of some sort; a “Megbot”.
Because the internet hadn’t fully entered its cesspool period yet, the whole thing stayed pretty tongue-in-cheek and playful, in the same spirit as The Stripes themselves – with no fans being so bold as to actually accuse the Megbot to her face or, worse yet, attempt to disconnect her hard drive. The “Meg White is a Robot” blog was eventually deactivated many moons ago [possibly because they knew too much?], but the rumour itself was at least a big enough thing for a while that Meg was directly asked about it by a reporter during a White Stripes tour stop in Vancouver in 2003.
At first, Meg downplayed the original Jack White robot quote, saying he was just “being silly,” but the proliferation of the storyline didn’t actually bother her a bit. “Now there’s a website that has got all these arguments about why I am actually a robot,” Meg said. “That’s really funny. I like that.”
The reporter then asked, for the record, if Meg White would like to clarify that she was not, in fact, a robot. There was a chuckle, then a pause. “I don’t know,” Meg said. “Maybe I am.”
Some 20 years later, most examinations of footage from White Stripes’ videos and performances still suggest that Meg White was probably always a human and not a Megbot. However, considering how rarely she has been seen over the past decade, it’s a safe bet that today’s self-educated social media researchers will eventually reopen the case.
After all, would a successful musician really leave the entertainment industry and reject fame just for the sake of their mental health and personal values? Or is it more likely that they are a robot that doesn’t age and thus must remain in hiding to prevent the world from discovering the truth? The Megbot truthers will get to the bottom of this.
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