Every billionaire in the world probably thinks of themselves as a real-life Tony Stark, but Elon Musk might actually have a better claim to that title than most of them. He’s the founder of SpaceX, the CEO of Tesla Motors, and the co-founder of PayPal, which means—like Stark—he has his fingers in a lot of futuristic pies. In fact, as reported by CNN, Musk was recently invited to a meeting at the Pentagon, and if a tweet about that meeting is to be believed, it seems like Musk is interested in making those Tony Stark comparisons a lot more direct.
Nobody really knows what the meeting was about (because the Pentagon is big on keeping secrets for some reason), though Musk said on Twitter that it was regarding “something about a flying metal suit.” That could easily just be an Iron Man joke, but the thing about Musk is that he makes both scenarios equally believable. If the government wants to make an army of Iron Mans (and it absolutely does), then Musk would be the guy to talk to, but he’s also the kind of guy who would make a joke about it.
Further muddying the waters is the fact that Musk recently announced that he believes we’re all living in an advanced civilization’s ridiculously elaborate computer simulation, telling The Verge recently that mankind is either “going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will cease to exist.” When the guy is already thinking on that level, it’s pretty much impossible to tell whether or not he’s joking about helping the Pentagon make Iron Man suits. Plus, even if he came out and said it wasn’t real, it’d also be impossible to tell if that’s the truth, because the Pentagon could be forcing him to cover it up.
Meanwhile, at Facebook HQ, Mark Zuckerberg is commanding his lackeys to build him an Iron Man suit of his own, yelling at them about how “Elon Musk was able to build this in a cave…with a box of scraps.”