Elon Musk isn’t exactly known for his quick wit, and a recent incident on X-formerly-Twitter shows exactly why that is.
In a throwaway post about the dodgy WiFi offerings on Delta Airlines flights, machine learning engineer and co-founder of the firm Proof of Human Matt Hardy quipped a few days back that “we should just sandbox the [AI] agents by giving them Delta Wifi.”
Coming on the back of tech-industry buzz about AI agents busting out of closed-off research environments, the timely joke attracted a respectable 11,000 likes: not bad for a tweet probably born out of Hardy’s own frustrations on a Delta flight. There were even a couple hundred comments, including a simple laughing emoji from Elon Musk.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 30, 2026
The line evidently made an impression in the mind of the arch-billionaire. A day later, Musk posted his own light rewording of the joke, complete with a drawn-on explanation: “best way to sandbox an AI is to put it on a Delta flight — it will have no chance of accessing the internet!” he enthused.
Best way to sandbox an AI is to put it on a Delta flight – it will have no chance of accessing the Internet!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 30, 2026
Musk’s joke immediately went double platinum, pulling 155,000 likes and thousands of comments. Though the billionaire’s comments on X are usually full of Musk fanatics crawling over themselves to appease their idol, these ones had some venom.
“Lol almost as funny as the original post,” one user replied. “Claiming other people’s work as his own is Musk’s entire career,” another jabbed.
It really is part and parcel for Musk, who — despite his vast wealth — has little going for him by way of originality, whether in the humor department or matters of business. Despite the image he’s cultivated for himself as a tech trailblazer, Musk’s core strength as an entrepreneur lies in his access to capital, rather than any Tony Stark-esque visionary genius.
His companies and products are frequently just rebranded concepts from pulpy sci-fi books of his youth: Neuralink was aped from Iain M. Banks’s “neural lace” in the utopian space opera “The Culture,” as were the names for SpaceX’s rocket recovery ships; the name for his infamous AI tool Grok is taken from the Martian word for “understand” in Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land;” the Cybertruck was described by Musk himself as something “Bladerunner would have driven.” (In the eponymous 1982 film, “Blade Runner” is a job title, not the name of a character.)
Musk’s graft goes well beyond merely overhauling dusty science fiction concepts. Despite being frequently hailed as the inventor of the Hyperloop, Musk’s original 2013 white paper on the system was built on centuries of proposals and conceptual designs, and was later found to have been penned not to advance a novel form of transit, but to help kill a high-speed rail project proceeding in California (13 years later, it Musk’s strategy was successful.)
The designs for Tesla’s Optimus robots were likewise cut and pasted from the 2004 Will Smith film “I, Robot,” a slight for which director Alex Proyas slammed Musk on social media. Of course, Musk’s broader role in Tesla is well known at this point — not as one of the original luminaries, but as the deep-pocketed bully who initiated a hostile takeover from within. Heck, the billionaire was even forced to delete a series of tweets in 2018 after stealing an artist’s drawing of a unicorn.
No matter what direction you approach Musk’s business empire from, it’s clear that he owes much of his success to the ideas of others — whether as an entrepreneur, or as a poster regurgitating stolen jokes for throngs of adoring fanboys.
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