Hot off a successful second-quarter earnings call that brought Tesla’s stock skyrocketing 16% upwards, CEO Elon Musk appears to be in an incredibly good mood. In a tweet posted this weekend, Musk shared a parody video created by a Tesla fan poking fun at the company’s short-sellers.
The video, which involved the classic meme-worthy scene from 2004’s WW2 drama Downfall, featured subtitles directly referencing some of the challenges that Tesla and Elon Musk have faced over the past few months. The Downfall meme has been around for a very long time, with the first parody videos emerging in 2006. The meme quickly gained popularity, with Oliver Hirschbiegel, Downfall ‘s director, stating in an interview that he is quite fond of the meme that his movie has spawned, according to Know Your Meme .
“I think I’ve seen about 145 of them! Of course, I have to put the sound down when I watch. Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I’m laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn’t get a better compliment as a director,” he said in an interview.
Quality-wise, Elon Musk’s recently shared version of the meme is arguably one of the finest ones that have been uploaded so far. The creator of the video, Michael March , included practically everything that Tesla and Elon Musk have gone through over the past few months, from the misinformation surrounding the company, to Elon Musk’s mini-submarine for the stranded soccer team in Thailand, to the controversy surrounding lots filled with Tesla’s vehicles after the end of the second quarter, when the company hit its target of producing 5,000 Model 3 in one week. The parody video even mentioned GA4, the sprung structure Tesla set up to help achieve the Model 3’s production target at the end of Q2, as well as the Ethereum bots on Twitter pretending to be Musk.
Performance Model 3 review by @mattdebord https://t.co/uEA599VPcX
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 5, 2018
The timing of the recently-shared Downfall parody video also showed a lot of work, with the actual audio of the clip corresponding to some Tesla-specific references, such as the Model S (timed perfectly when the character of Adolf Hitler mentioned the SS), and allegations of Tesla’s electric cars “stallin’” (timed perfectly when Hitler mentioned Stalin). Overall, it was the perfect way to troll Tesla’s short-sellers, who lost approximately $1.7 billion in one day following the release of the electric car maker’s Q2 financial report and its succeeding earnings call.
Tesla’s rise in the stock market is something that Elon Musk has needed for a while now. Amidst the pressures of heightened criticism from the media over various aspects of his online behavior and Tesla’s difficulties in ramping production of the Model 3, Musk noted in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek that he had already ended up with permanent scar tissue. If his recent round of meme-directed Twitter trolling is any indication, however, it appears like Elon Musk is starting to become his old, sarcastic self again.
Watch the epic Downfall parody video recently-shared by Elon Musk below.
