A sculpture of Elon Musk has been recently spotted being towed behind a Tesla Cybertruck around the city of Brownsville, Texas.
“We had the idea to to bring something into life that would be more striking and maybe even crazier and funnier,” a French tech entrepreneur who goes by Louis XXII told ARTnews. He declined to provide his real name.
Louis XXII said the main goal was to bring more attention and visibility to a viral meme sparked by a bad drawing of the billionaire and SpaceX founder posted on Reddit six years ago.
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Louis XXII said he is the cofounder of ElonRWA, a “real world asset meme” tokenized on the second layer of the Ethereum blockchain (known as Ether L2) organized by the decentralized autonomous organization FeistyDAO.
“The statue is not linked to the valuation of this [ElonRWA] token,” he said. “It’s just a funny way to represent this meme in other ways.”
The idea for the nearly nine-foot-tall sculpture of Musk came after Louis XXII and his digital artist collective commissioned a large mural of the same bad drawing from Reddit with the words “Occupy Mars” earlier this year. Carlos Manuel Guerrero, a local artist in Brownsville, confirmed to ARTnews that he was the artist in an Instagram message.
The sculpture of Elon Musk next to the commissioned mural in Brownsville, Texas. Courtesy of Louis XXII.
The city of Brownsville is also located near the new headquarters of Musk’s aerospace manufacturing company, SpaceX, and its Starbase industrial complex.
“We wanted to bring this meme into the real world,” Louis XXII told ARTnews. “How could we have an impact on the real world? We are a bunch of guys on computers active on X, but we wanted to touch more people.”
A member of the decentralized autonomous organization FeistyDAO known as lil_dojo turned the drawing into a 3D rendering, and then Louis XXII found a company in Utah to produce the sculpture out of foam and fiberglass. lil_dojo had also previously purchased the original physical copy of the drawing of Musk from the Reddit user and the accompanying NFT.
“It took a big month to make it happen,” Louis XXII said, noting that he had received custody of the statue on August 15 and that it was painted bronze, and not made of the actual metal.
In 2021, images of the original bad drawing prompted several responses by Elon Musk himself on the social media platform X, whose endorsement and comments caused it to go viral.
Louis XXII told ARTnews that the endgoal of the collective behind ElonRWA was to put out reliable and authentic NFT projects after a number of scams garnered widespread media attention.
A report showed a 45 percent decline in sales of NFTs in the last quarter, but Louis XXII told ARTnews, “We don’t care about the market, we don’t care about anything. We just want to have fun. We want to do positive stuff, good project. And we know that in the long run, it [will] always pay back when you work with the right people, take time to build real projects with a real value.”
The news of the sculpture was first reported by the San Antonio Express News.
