Alas, it looks like Elon Musk may not fulfill his desire to meet his Chinese doppelganger ‘Yilong Musk’ (alias). As a result of ‘violating community guidelines,’ the billionaire’s lookalike has been banished from Chinese social media platforms and might prove harder to track down henceforth.
As of last week, Yilong (or whoever’s behind him) has been barred from posting on the microblogging platform Weibo and China’s version of TikTok, Douyin. While the much-discussed personality still has three posts on the former, all his content on the latter has been deleted.
Bursting onto the social media scene in December 2021, Yilong took the internet by storm for his strong resemblance to the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. Some netizens even wondered if both were long-lost twins.
In response to the rumors, Elon himself jokingly speculated that he might be “partly Chinese.”
Public scrutiny of the lookalike mounted as other netizens accused Yilong of using AI face-changing technology. After all, some said, he looked nothing like Elon in his older photographs on Weibo.
Plagued by similar doubts, Elon himself took to Twitter to question if his Chinese counterpart was a deepfake.
I’d like to meet this guy (if he is real). Hard to tell with deepfakes these days.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 9, 2022
The question remains: Who is Yilong Musk? Anyone with legitimate leads is encouraged to write to RADII.
Cover image via Weibo
