Elon Musk, entrepreneur, investor, CEO and founder of many different influential entities including Tesla and SpaceX, is seen as a leader in technological innovation. He is known for unusual experimental ideas.
We found this tweet by scrolling over the tallest pyramid on the graph. Two tweets came up. Both tweets are linked, having to do with anime. The tweet with the most engagement had to do specifically with the anime subgenre, mecha.
It is time to create a mecha
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2018
Mecha is a subgenre of Anime; the stories are based on giant robots or machines that are controlled by people. This tweet likely received the engagement that it did because Musk is known for pushing the limits of science and technology. If anyone could have the resources or potential ability to create science-fiction robots irl, it would be Musk.
Our search boolean was as follows:
Mecha “Elon Musk” OR to:elonmusk OR from:elonmusk -Porn -Stock
We set the tweet engagement to 15 likes or more on Tweetdeck and applied the boolean, which narrowed down the search results. By refining the search, there were no new insights, just buzz and excitement for a potential robot. Someone made a joke that they wanted to apply as a mecha pilot via Musk’s career site. When he couldn’t find the job posting, he uploaded his resume on twitter under the “mecha” thread.
I went on the careers page and couldn't find an application for mecha pilot (probably an oversight) anyways see if this can make it to Mr. Musk's desk if you can, I'm sure he'll know what to do with it pic.twitter.com/n9safdwWN5
— Anthony Robustelli (@Robo28734) October 18, 2018
We wanted to find tweets that included the terms “mecha” and either “Elon Musk” or tweets that were written by, or tweeted at Elon Musk. Finally we wanted to make sure we didn’t include any tweets that included pornographic material, because we found that many tweets under the umbrella topic of anime included this, and it was not relevant to our search. We also found that on the day he tweeted this, there were reports of Tesla stock going up, so there was twitter activity surrounding this and Elon Musk. However, this rise in stock value was likely the result of an announcement by Tesla on this same day, so we felt it was unrelated to our search for “mecha” tweets.
Georgie Volturo
Anna Relle
Elizabeth Stewart
Chris Vogt
Autumn Witz