We’re approaching the end of 2024, but Nick Jonas and Elon Musk aren’t going to finish the year without delivering us perhaps the strangest celebrity crossover in recent memory.
What do you get when a boy band pop star and a billionaire with ties to the presidency go on X? No, that’s not the opening of some bizarre joke, but the pretext of an interaction between Jonas and Musk that has us collectively scratching our heads. The encounter took place when Musk took to his own platform (he really loves it on there) to share a famous GIF in which Nick and his brothers (Joe and Kevin, for those who didn’t watch Camp Rock) are seen turning a wooden table.
As a bit of boy band lore, the GIF is taken from a YouTube video that went viral back in 2008, which shows the “Cake By The Ocean” trio bringing life to the popular idiom of “how the tables have turned.” Reviving the viral moment 16 years later (is that what the cool kids are doing?), Musk reshared the gif in response to an X post touting his Tesla success in the wake of his support for Donald Trump. “Wait…. everyone thought Elon Musk was destroying the Brand of Tesla and he shouldn’t be involved in politics,” the post read. “Tesla is up 100% since Donald Trump won!”.
That, according to Musk, was a sentiment worthy of the “tables turning,” but the argument could be made that anyone commenting on their own success in the form of a GIF shouldn’t be anywhere near the levers of the White House (the soon-to-be occupant has a wild enough social media footprint as it is). In any case, Nick soon got wind of the billionaire’s use of the GIF, and responded in a way that feels reminiscent of a fangirl who campaigned vigorously for Ariana Grande to get an Oscar (it’s me, I’m the fangirl). “Take us to the year 3000,” Nick wrote, alongside an image of Musk pointing ahead… presumably in the direction of the year 3000.
Though we can’t truly know the meaning behind the post, one can deduce that for Nick, Musk is something of a time-traveler with his Space X company and his hell-bent mission to travel to Mars (even though enough is going on down here already). Nick’s request for the billionaire to take us to the future has been taken by some onlookers as a show of support, prompting criticism given Musk’s Musk’s divisive status (to put it mildly). “Tweeting at Elon Musk is definitely a choice,” one user wrote, with another imploring the singer to “delete this.” Others questioned if “this is a Trump post” and pleaded for Nick’s wife, Priyanka Chopra, to “get your man.”
To answer that user’s question, Nick’s fangirl moment with Musk might not necessarily mean he supports the billionaire’s bromantic partner, since the pop star was vocal in his support of Joe Biden throughout his first term. However, Nick is clearly not a part of the celebrity mass exodus from X that took place after Trump’s election victory, and claimed the profiles of everyone from Jamie Lee Curtis to Mark Hamill and Stephen King.
Perhaps, then, Nick’s interaction with Musk was just a playful moment — one in which he is unaware of all the disinformation, all the assassination ‘jokes’, and all the implications that come when a billionaire is advising the president on how to minimize government waste. The day Nick Jonas discovers all that is the day when the tables truly will have turned.
Published: Dec 18, 2024 05:34 am