It’s not often that I find biblical verses popping into my head, but when I stumbled once again on a massive Youtube account spouting AI-generated Elon Musk fantasy sludge yesterday, Matthew 7:16 (I had to look this up) suddenly floated into my thoughts. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” goes the line that I couldn’t get out of my head, and there in the feed of an account with more than 150,000 subscribers was a stunning visual tableau of Elon Musk’s poisoned fruits. After decades of false promises and outright lies, Elon Musk’s stock pumping antics have become entirely automatable by generative AI models that can pick up where he left off, creating their own, new blatant lies about Tesla, SpaceX, and their actual and prospective accomplishments.

For most of the last decade, the fruits of Musk’s endless parade of science fiction prognostication and outright deception were understood to be the EV market they helped birth. Elon may bend the truth, countless people have told me in their most patronizing tones over the years, but look at the good he’s doing. By his fruits ye shall know him. For a long time there was little one could say to refute this utilitarian bedrock of his fanbase, even to people who should have known better.

No longer. The fact that Tesla’s core business of making and selling electric cars is falling apart just as generative AI floods the internet with high-confidence nonsense is almost too perfect to be a coincidence. Now, as each new quarterly earnings call makes Musk’s apathy about Tesla’s failing car business more clear, it’s obvious that EVs weren’t actually the lasting fruits of Musk’s labors. Rather, his true legacy is pollution: of the natural environment surrounding his factories, but just as importantly of the shared knowledge and culture of the internet. Generative models spewing an endless feed of newly-imagined lies faster than humans can debunk them, the automation of Musk’s long assault on reality, is his true gift to the future.

After all, Musk has never had to utter many of his worst untruths himself. A huge part of his game has been cultivating an information ecosystem around himself that lets him hint or suggest at things, which an army of bloggers, influencers, trolls, and yes, even real reporters, then interpret exactly as he intended them to. This allows him to spread the lie without having to go on the record himself. With generative AI inventing new vehicles, battery chemistries, and partnerships for Tesla out of whole cloth, that function has become fully automated.

Indeed, from the moment I first encountered generative AI I was blown away by the fact that Musk’s unique pollution of the internet could literally be seen in the images they produce. When the first DALL-E mini became available for public use, I prompted it to show me images of a self-driving car and it produced variations of two basic images: one archetype was clearly inspired by Google/Waymo’s pioneering “Firefly” AV, while the other one looked a lot like a Tesla’s interior, complete with a steering wheel and even human hands controlling it. Why would an AI ever show a self-driving car with a human operating human controls? The answer was obvious to me, having followed Tesla for so long: because it was trained on the internet, and Elon Musk’s lies have polluted the internet. By their fruits ye shall know them.

In fact, Elon Musk has so thoroughly embodied the figure of a prophet in the modern internet era, that generative models (or, at the very least, humans in the thrall of traffic-sorting social media algorithms) have begun to inject him into the traditional domain of the prophet: religion. Another Youtube account peddling AI sludge, only this time aimed at the perennially profitable market of evangelical Christians awaiting an imminent apocalypse, includes Musk as a major figure in its videos alongside more traditional eschatological figures like Trump, Biden, Netanyahu and the Pope. And true to his real life persona, Musk fills the role of the prophet who regularly predicts the End Times and then unabashedly predicts it again just weeks or months later when it doesn’t come to pass. Musk almost never discusses religion, let alone evangelical Christianity, and yet these powerful pattern-matching machines were able to place him plausibly in that context.

This shouldn’t be a surprise though, as it is becoming increasingly clear that what Musk is doing is not real entrepreneurship but a new kind of monetized religion. I know calling Musk’s following a “cult” is hardly original (I should, considering I was featured in a documentary of the same name!), but I’m not just talking about the loyalty of his following here. As time goes on, and his stock pumping narratives become more and more fantastical, they increasingly take on philosophical and even spiritual dimensions.

This was made abundantly clear during yesterday afternoon’s Tesla earnings call, in which Musk hyped Tesla’s humanoid general purpose robot “Optimus” in terms that could only be described as religious. Thanks to Optimus and the AI that will animate it, “we are headed for an age of abundance, where there is no shortage of goods and services,” Musk claimed. “Anyone can have pretty much anything they want.” Even by the standards of a guy who promised that Tesla’s cars will become economic perpetual motion machines, earning owners more than they cost, the end of scarcity is a staggeringly ambitious pitch.

What Musk is promising isn’t just an earthly Garden of Eden, but the creation of a race of mechanical humans who will bring humanity from scarcity to superabundance. The core premise of Optimus, Musk made clear, is that it can replace humans in “more or less” every form of economic value creation, effectively bringing back slavery in a new mechanical form factor that does away with the previous version’s ethical issues. What this boils down to is the promise to deliver on the ultimate triumph of technology over god or nature: the creation of artificial humans. With this pitch, Musk reveals that he sees himself as being able to match the miracle of human life, that he is able to transcend the abilities of mere mortals and take on the work of gods.

Having followed Musk’s journey for some time, it’s no surprise that he’s ended up here. Confidence games often rely on ever-increasing stakes, as they always need something even more tantalizing to retain the mark who is beginning to suspect the last promise won’t be coming true, and Tesla has been a confidence game for a long time. As a car company, there was nowhere else to go from “your car will drive you anywhere and earn more money than it cost,” so Musk more or less had to embrace the work of gods to keep raising the stakes. What else was he going to do, actually deliver affordable, camera-only Level 5 self-driving?

Just like “Full Self-Driving,” there is no shortage of ways to prove that Tesla will not in fact be able to recreate humanity by putting statistical models of the internet into a mechanical body, but when you reach the point where making that argument becomes necessary it’s probably best to stop and take a deep breath. The problem is not just that people have to high of an opinion of the state of technology, but that we must harbor an appalling spiritual bankruptcy to believe that the divine spark of consciousness in all of us could ever be quantified, coded, and replicated. The “misplaced concreteness” of technology that Joseph Weizenbaum warned about must be so deeply baked in to believe that this is possible, that it has become a spiritual belief unto itself.

“It may be that religion was not addictive at all,” Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 masterpiece Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation. “Had it been, perhaps God would not have died and the new rationality would not have won out over grace. But instrumental reason, triumphant technique, and unbridled science are addictive. They create a concrete reality, a self-fulfilling nightmare.”

These are the prophetic words that echo in my head, when I hear Musk pitch a conference call of well-educated financial analysts on his prospective career as a creator God. A self-fulfilling nightmare is exactly what I see when Musk’s trail of lies become inputs into an automated lie machine, polluting the most powerful tool we have for discovering the truth, for the religious and the ostensibly rational alike. And as time goes on, and it seems increasingly clear that no amount of truth can deflate Musk’s obscene lies, it feels more and more like we already are stuck in a previously-unimaginable apocalypse.

By our fruits ye shall know us.