Wait, Has Elon Musk Even Seen ‘Blade Runner?’

If Elon Musk bought Twitter to stop people from brutally roasting him day in and day out, that plan spectacularly failed. The new Twitter CEO has only been dunked on more since the acquisition, which is what happens when you force your tweets into everyone’s feed while simultaneously tanking the whole platform.

Such was the case on Tuesday evening when Musk replied to a fan club account fawning over Tesla’s Cybertruck. In response to a tweet calling the vehicle “the most bad ass truck ever made,” Musk wrote, “It’s an armored personnel carrier from the future – what Bladerunner would have driven.”

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2023

As anyone who’s watched Blade Runner knows, Harrison Ford’s character in the iconic Ridley Scott film is named Rick Deckard. He is not “Bladerunner.” He also doesn’t drive around in an “armored personnel carrier,” but instead, a futuristic flying car that, unlike the Cybertruck, can make it over a curb.

More notably, Blade Runner isn’t an action movie about a guy plowing into robots with his massive vehicle. It’s a film noir detective story based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep that interrogates humanity’s reliance on machinery that one day might not want to do our bidding. We’ve read the book, and no one shoots a Tommy gun into a future truck, so Elon Musk is off his gourd.

Naturally, Twitter went to work on Musk’s tweet as “Bladerunner” continued to trend on his own platform well into the next day.

You can see some of the reactions below:

— Casey Stegman (@cstegman) November 1, 2023

Blade Runner (two words) is not the name of any character in Blade Runner and Deckard did drive a car which could fly, was safe, and didn’t look like dogshit pic.twitter.com/t3eG2JE7lN

— punished evan (@eeesssjjj) November 1, 2023

Ah yes, I remember in Blade Runner when the bounty hunter John Bladerunner said "Every Run Has It's Blade" really powerful stuff pic.twitter.com/tOYMX85e1V