Elon Musk finally breaks silence after lookalike from China goes viral

CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, also the world’s richest man, Elon Musk is a businessman almost always in the news. Recently, a doppelganger of Musk had surfaced in the internet, where a man looking like the entrepreneur was seen standing next to a black automobile in China. The clip with Musk’s lookalike smiling into a camera was first released on Douyin, China's equivalent of TikTok.

The Asian man quickly went viral for having a near perfect resemblance with Musk. The startling resemblance between this anonymous person and the tech billionaire led people to christen him ‘Yi Long Musk’.

Days after the doppelganger’s pics and video had gone viral, Musk decided to finally comment on the bizarre resemblance with the Chinese man. Replying to a tweet that had shared the doppelganger’s pic next to Musk’s, he wrote, “Maybe I’m partly Chinese.”

Maybe I’m partly Chinese!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2021

When the pic surfaced, some had claimed it was a deepfake, which is an optimization technique to superimpose a convincing face on anyone. There's really no way to confirm because it's still unclear who the person in the video is, thus it is impossible to establish that it was indeed his face.