by - Ghislaine Maxwell has reportedly asked Elon Musk to destroy the internet in the famous photo of the two.
- Musk has previously said that Maxwell’s appearance in the photo was a photobomb.
- The photo was taken at a Vanity Fair event in 2014, but didn’t appear on social media until 2020.
Elon Musk’s photo with Ghislaine Maxwell may have been more than a photobomb after all.
The photo was taken in 2014 at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in California, but didn’t make the rounds on social media until 2020, when Musk took to Twitter to say that he did not know Maxwell “at all”.
“She photobombed me once at a Vanity Fair party several years ago,” he tweeted in July 2020. “The real question is why VF invited her in the first place.”
But the story seems a bit more complicated, according to a recent New York Times report. When the photo was taken, Maxwell asked Musk if there was a way to delete information about oneself from the Internet, the Times reported Tuesday. Maxwell also told the Tesla CEO that he wanted to destroy the internet, a Vanity Fair employee standing next to the pair told the Times.
The employee, who chose to remain anonymous because of potential repercussions, said the pair also discussed aliens and Musk developed his theory that reality could be a simulation.
Musk did not respond to a request for comment from Insider prior to publication.
The photo of the billionaire alongside Maxwell, a known associate of Jeffrey Epstein, was widely shared on Twitter earlier this year, and after the billionaire initially offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion in April.
It resurfaced on Twitter last week, only this time with a new context note as part of Twitter’s new Birdwatch feature, which aims to curb misinformation on the platform by inviting users to vote for helpful context.
ONE tweet containing the photo had a note at the bottom that read: “The photo of Musk and Maxwell was taken at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party im 2014. It is the only photo of the pair. There is no photo evidence to suggest that they spoke. Musk responded later about the photo and said he didn’t know Maxwell and that he was “photobombing” him.
Almost a week later, though, the note is gone. Twitter confirmed to Insider that a context note can be removed from a tweet if its status is changed to “useful”. The box only appears with a tweet if enough Birdwatch contributors with opposing views vote it “helpful”.
Only a select group of Twitter user testers can submit and vote on the environment at this time, but everyone in the US can see the notes.
In June, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to sex-trafficking girls for Epstein.
In 2020, Insider reported that Epstein introduced Musk’s younger brother, Kimbal Musk, to a woman in his circle to get close to the Tesla CEO. Kimball and the woman dated from 2011 to 2012, and Epstein was given a tour of Elon’s SpaceX company in 2012, sources told Insider. At the time, SpaceX denied that Epstein was given a tour and neither was Musk he said on Twitter that Epstein never toured SpaceX “to our knowledge.”
Read the full New York Times story on their website.
