Elon Musk wants to meet Chinese doppelgänger - but says he might not be real person

Elon Musk says he wants to meet his Chinese dopplegänger - but he's still not sure if he's a real person.

The lookalike, known as Yilong Ma, first went viral last year on Douyin, China's equivalent to TikTok, after he shared a video of himself standing next to a car.

The tech billionaire even acknowledged the resemblance after someone tweeted a split image of the two.

"Maybe I'm partly Chinese!" Musk wrote at the time.

But on Monday (9 May), Musk responded to someone else on Twitter who made the suggestion that the "Chinese Elon Musk" could be a decoy for the real thing.

Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter

"I'd like to meet this guy (if he is real). Hard to tell with deepfakes these days," Musk said.

He also said that he also wants to meet Musk.

"I am here. I want very much to see you too! I love you; you are my hero," he wrote on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.

Ma is also now on TikTok and posts under the username "Elong Musk" and has more than 235,200 followers.

Since creating his account, he has posted several videos, including an introductory video where he calls himself "China's Elon Musk."

When Ma released his initial video last year, viewers thought that he used deep fake technology because the likeness seemed too good to be true.

Deepfakes use artificial intelligence, known as deep learning to create images of false events and people.

In a report from The Guardian, the image manipulation technology first started to gain traction in 2017 after a Reddit user swapped the faces of famous celebrities onto pornstar performers.

Elsewhere, Musk recently praised China's work ethic in an interview with the Financial Times.

Comparing American and Chinese work ethics, Musk said that while employees in China will "burn the 3am oil", people in the US people are "trying to avoid going to work at all."

"They won't just be burning the midnight oil. They will be burning the 3am oil. They won't even leave the factory type of thing, whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all," he explained.

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.