Pedestrians in San Francisco were amused and creeped out at the same time when they spotted a robot dog with Elon Musk’s face walking along the South Beach waterfront.
The mechanical quadruped appeared in the city on Apr. 8 and quickly gathered crowds of people who pulled out their phones to record its movements. Social media subsequently filled with mixed reactions. Some called the sight terrifying and deeply wrong while others just giggled about how ridiculous it looked.
“tbh I’d freak out if I saw the Elon dog wandering at night when I’m in the middle of a walk,” commented one user on Musk’s social media platform.
Real dogs reacted strongly too. In one instance, two pet canines barked loudly and pulled hard on their leashes, clearly disturbed by the strange robotic creation.
Aside from strutting along on four metallic legs and giving people the willies, this bizarre quadruped was observed pooping out prints of photographs that it took with a built in camera.
The robot belongs to digital artist Beeple’s “Regular Animals” series. Beeple outfits standard Unitree Go2 robo-dogs with hyper-realistic silicone masks created by Hyperflesh. The peculiar visionary, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, first showed the full pack at Art Basel Miami Beach in December with a group that included robo-dog versions of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.
The San Francisco sighting serves as a fun preview for his upcoming mid-career survey/art exhibition called “Infinite_Loop.” It opens on Apr. 18 at Node gallery in Palo Alto, California.
Winkelmann says that he “makes a variety of art crap across a variety of media” and that “some of it is ok, but a lot of it kind of blows ass.”
The strange artist claims to be trying to make it suck less every day and requests that people bear with him.
Creepy robot dog wearing a hyper realistic silicone mask of Elon Musk was spotted waking around San Francisco pic.twitter.com/2iRBur05Br
— Crime Net (@TRIGGERHAPPYV1) April 10, 2026
Read more: Elon Musk insists the next frontier for AI is above the atmosphere
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