It starts subtly—at first, noticeable in a few poorly shot photos on Twitter. Then, as the Devil lounges in the infernal depths, idly scrolling through mankind’s latest follies, something strikes him. The images of Elon Musk—even the old ones depicting the fresh-faced tech grifter of the PayPal days, and the peak meme-daddy era of 2018—as well as those taken yesterday, and right now, this very moment’s images—have subtly changed…
A softening around the eyes. A strange unfocus of the lips. A peculiar blur, as if reality itself hesitates to confirm whether he is still among the living.
At first, the Devil assumes it’s somehow all in his own mind. But the phenomenon seems so real. Perhaps it’s mere photographic distortion—but universally, across all Musk photos? Why?
Baffled, the Devil idly wonders if it’s a common occurrence associated with living souls dabbling in too many realities—Twitter polls, Mars colonies, AI doom cults, government cuts, and a failing car company—all at once. But then come the videos. And in every single one, there is the same subtle, eerie aura of unfocus, and the added curiosity of a slight delay, a spectral lag, as if the universe itself is making some kind of post-mortem adjustment.
It hits the Devil in a shocking epiphany: Musk has already died!
And yet, here he is, moving, speaking, making bizarre pronouncements about monkey-brain chips and his greedy, egocentric need to father the world’s future workforce.
Like an accountant auditing Hell’s deepest financial fraud, the Devil retraces Musk’s steps, attempting to pinpoint the moment it happened, the Rapture of the Self. That inevitable moment when a mere mortal, bloated on hubris, convinced of his own infallibility, accidentally un-alives himself in an emotional burst of billionaire-grade stupidity.
Maybe it was one too many “sink” memes, a metaphor Musk himself failed to comprehend. Maybe he secretly attempted to launch his own essence into space, the first true man-to-orbital-narcissism fusion experiment, only to realize, too late, that his rockets work on the same engineering principles as the Wile E. Coyote ACME catalog. Whatever it was, the original Musk has perished—but something else has taken his place.
What we see now—what all the photographs and videos are struggling to capture—is Zombie Musk, the artificially reanimated remains of a soul who once was. The blur around the eyes? That’s the telltale lack of a walking corpse’s soul retention. The strange time-delay in speech, the misfiring jokes, the increasing sense that his entire persona is a clunky AI model trained on bad 2015 memes? Those are all signs of the universe’s post-mortem processing lag.
And the world, without quite knowing why, is already adjusting.
Yes, the photographs and videos don’t lie. Or rather, they do—but only in that uncanny way reality messes with one’s mind when it’s still catching up to a death it hasn’t fully processed.
