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The world\u2019s first trillionaire just celebrated his 55th birthday.<\/p>\n
And we can\u2019t 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 \u2014 or that his social media network is convinced it was actually him<\/a> that posted the slop under his mom\u2019s name.<\/p>\n \u201cHappy birthday to my wonderful son,\u201d the X account of Musk\u2019s mother, Maye Musk, tweeted on Sunday<\/a>. \u201cElon Musk has given me 55 years of joy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s so much fun to celebrate with family and friends,\u201d the account added curtly, not beating the allegations that a bot had penned the tweet. \u201cHis cake is a rocket and a Moon base.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n As netizens were quick to point out, a hard-to-miss \u201cMade With AI\u201d tag<\/a> was affixed to the post \u2014 before mysteriously being removed \u2014 undermining the pictures\u2019 validity, and bumming everybody out even more. <\/p>\n However, we can\u2019t rule out that Musk\u2019s mother used AI to edit the pictures in post instead of generating them from scratch. While there aren\u2019t any obvious signs of the pictures being faked in their entirety \u2014 though there\u2019s a hyperreal sheen on the candles photo, and some of the Legos do look a bit garbled \u2014 users were left unconvinced.<\/p>\n \u201cI would never understand why making moments like this with AI?\u201d one user replied<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cYou made your son\u2019s birthday picture with AI?\u201d another added<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cOh, no,\u201d one user replied<\/a>. \u201cThat\u2019s not his mum. He owns that account too.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAlso he controls that account himself lol,\u201d another wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n The theory that Musk was puppeteering his own mother\u2019s account flared up earlier this year, following a head-scratching missive<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cYour mom told me she was cleaning toilets in a Liverpool boarding house as a child,\u201d Maye Musk\u2019s account wrote in a since-deleted tweet<\/a> earlier this year, seemingly referring to herself in the third person, despite ostensibly being Elon\u2019s mother. \u201cWhen I met her in 1966, she was sewing linings for a furrier in a small windowless room behind the store.\u201d<\/p>\n The tweet caused plenty of confusion, with users pointing out that Musk had already secretly roleplayed as his own toddler son<\/a>, X \u00c6 A-12, through an alt account.<\/p>\n However, we\u2019re not convinced of the theory, considering that Maye Musk could have been plausibly talking about the trillionaire\u2019s grandmother, not \u201cmom,\u201d and simply mistyped.<\/p>\n Outside of a surprisingly depressing AI-enhanced birthday wish on X, Musk\u2019s big day was overshadowed by a very different kind of controversy. The richest man in the world has spent<\/a> much of the last week defending himself after being accused of murdering millions<\/a> through his careless dismantling of USAID<\/a> \u2014 an effective death sentence<\/a> for some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.<\/p>\n