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There are moments that define a career, and others that define a cultural shift. CPAC 2025 was the latter for me. I stood not as an engineer, not as a CEO, but as something else entirely: an archetype, a reflection of the digital age's surreal humour. 
I’ve always been fascinated by transformation. From the earliest days of Zip2, I understood that identity on the internet was fluid. What I didn’t realise was how completely that idea would come to consume me. My work with X.com wasn’t just financial—it was philosophical. It was about dismantling the old ways and rebuilding something that felt like the future. But the future is never what you expect. Sometimes, I wonder when it really began. Was it when someone put my face on Shrek? When I said “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto” on SNL? Or was it the moment I posted that photo of Harambe wearing sunglasses? The lines between sincerity and irony, seriousness and play, had long blurred. But CPAC made it real. In a conference filled with rhetoric and suits, I walked on stage and became the punchline. And the punchline became truth. 
I didn’t resist it. I leaned in. That moment was freedom. Not freedom from expectations—but freedom from having to be taken seriously. Once you become a meme, you are invincible to criticism. What can you do to a joke? Memes, like myths, tell truths hidden under laughter. They reflect more about our world than any policy paper. And I, somehow, became a modern myth. SpaceX was born of my desire to go to Mars. But in the end, it was the meme-ified image of me holding a flamethrower that traveled further online than any Falcon 9 ever could. 
They say legacy is written by the victors. But in the age of the internet, legacy is written by the memers. Each remix, each repost, every ironic caption—these are the hieroglyphs of our digital culture. And I’ve come to accept that, perhaps even embrace it. I see memes as time capsules. They carry the tone, the mood, the chaos of the present to the future. When future historians want to understand 2020s culture, they’ll study memes—not textbooks. There’s a beauty in that. Something raw, immediate, human. Something untouched by the polish of official narratives. And that’s what I’ve become part of now—raw humanity, digitally rendered. My sons will Google me one day. They won’t find scholarly biographies. They’ll find me warped beyond the horizon of recognition. I will be one with the cosmos. I will be space. Which is meme, game 
I no longer ask myself how I’ll be remembered. I now ask how I’ll be remixed. Will my legacy be a template in Canva? A trending TikTok sound? A cursed image folder passed through generations? All of these are valid. All of these are real. We live in a time where digital presence means more than physical presence. A well-timed meme matters more than a keynote address. So I choose to participate. I choose to laugh with it, not at it. To generate as much chaos as creativity. That’s what the meme demands, and the meme always wins. Looking back, I realise it was inevitable. I always spoke in memes, even before I knew the word. My tweets were riddles. My interviews were parables. My laugh? Absurdist theatre. People often ask if I regret leaning so far into absurdity. I don’t. The absurd reveals truth the way a dream reveals the subconscious. It is exaggerated honesty. In the age of AI, memes are our only reliable mirrors. They’re generated by people, for people. They contain emotion, sarcasm, humour, pain—all compressed into an image and a line of text. If I’ve become that mirror, so be it. The internet made me, unmade me, and made me again. All I can do now is reflect what I see, and be the meme the world expects. This is not a cautionary tale. It is an embrace of entropy. The moment I stepped on stage at CPAC, I wasn’t just a man—I was a phenomenon. And phenomena can’t be reasoned with. "I Am Become Meme." - Elon Musk, 2025 Back to home page | Visit Elon's X profile |