{"id":260307,"date":"2026-04-10T01:14:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T01:14:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/260307\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T01:14:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T01:14:32","slug":"why-a-terrifying-elon-musk-robot-dog-is-roaming-san-francisco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/260307\/","title":{"rendered":"Why a \u2018terrifying\u2019 Elon Musk robot dog is roaming San Francisco"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Elon Musk has been turning heads in San Francisco \u2014 or at least his likeness.<\/p>\n<p>A flesh-colored android has been spotted roaming the city streets with an eerily realistic head resembling that of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, drawing curious and confused crowds.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The stunt in South Beach around Oracle Park on Wednesday, April 8, was part of a marketing push for digital artist Beeple\u2019s upcoming exhibition, \u201cINFINITE_LOOP.\u201d It opens April 18 at the Palo Alto digital art center NODE.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;NODE is a home for artists defining digital culture today. Beeple\u2019s Regular Animals are a physical embodiment of that culture, and we\u2019re proud to bring a piece of it here to Silicon Valley,\u201d a NODE representative told the Chronicle. \u201cSending Elon into the streets is a way to bring that energy into public life ahead of the exhibition opening next week, and the reaction has been exactly what Beeple\u2019s work does so well: it stops people in their tracks and gets them talking.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Beeple, a South Carolina-based artist whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, created the piece as part of his \u201cRegular Animals\u201d series. It also features Unitree Go2 robo-dog versions of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and Winkelmann himself. Each head was created in collaboration with silicone mask maker Hyperflesh.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u2018Regular Animals\u2019 reinterprets the legacy of pop portraiture, sculpture, and generative art through the lens of technology. Each robotic humanoid is not a static object but a fluid digital canvas \u2014 its memories captured, reimagined, and preserved on the blockchain,\u201d Node\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/nodefoundation.com\/program\/infinite-loop\" data-link=\"native\" class=\"\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">website<\/a> reads. \u201cAfter three years \u2014 twenty-one &#8216;dog years&#8217; \u2014 each robot will &#8216;die,&#8217; with all memories from its life preserved forever on-chain.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Winkelmann debuted the work in December at Art Basel in Miami, but this week marks the first time one of the robots has been sent into the wild.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Reactions to the Musk robo-dog have been mixed. Some social media users have called it \u201cterrifying\u201d and \u201cso wrong,\u201d while others have found it hilarious.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Beeple has been making digital art since 2007, when he began creating and posting a new piece daily as part of a project titled \u201cEverydays.\u201d He notably sold a compilation of the first 5,000 days of the project for $69.3 million in 2021. It was the third-highest auction price achieved by a living artist at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk has been turning heads in San Francisco \u2014 or at least his likeness. A flesh-colored android&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[329,65739,7,101,103,102,104,106,105,200,995,2013],"class_list":{"0":"post-260307","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-arts-and-entertainment","9":"tag-arts-and-exhibits","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-san-francisco","12":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","13":"tag-san-francisco-news","14":"tag-sf","15":"tag-sf-headlines","16":"tag-sf-news","17":"tag-south-bay","18":"tag-tech","19":"tag-us-and-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}