Elon Musk’s Twitter post raises suspicions of him playing The Idolmaster Cinderella Girls

Publication date of the original Japanese article: 2021-01-13 20:18 (JST)
Translated by. Braden Noyes

On January 13 (JST), Elon Musk, who has a history of posting tweets that cause a stir, posted an image on Twitter of a character named Sachiko Koshimizu from a game titled The Idolmaster Cinderella Girls. In the game, players take on the role of a producer in charge of training girls to become successful idols.

Needless to say, a world-famous billionaire posting an image of self-proclaimed “cutest idol” Sachiko quickly got the attention of other players. Even some Japanese news media outlets took notice of the tweet, leading to a round of speculations on the social media platform.

Elon Musk is co-founder and current CEO of the American automotive company known as Tesla Motors, Inc. According to an article in Forbes, Musk was officially declared the richest man in the world as of January 8, 2021, with an estimated net worth of around $189 billion USD.

Musk is also known for causing a commotion on Twitter from time to time with his often poorly thought-out tweets. These have even included a number of tweets containing anime- or game-related content. For example, he posted a fanart image back in 2019 of the character known as 2B from NieR: Automata. When another Twitter user replied and suggested he should give credit to the original artist, Musk responded with an argument stating, “I wish people would stop crediting artists on twitter when any fool can find out who the artist was in seconds. It’s destroying the medium.” This led to backlash from the online community.

Another example of his careless Twitter posts occurred in 2018 when he jokingly tweeted that he was “[…] considering taking Tesla private at $420[…]”. The fallout resulted in an SEC investigation and a $20 million dollar fine.

For those unfamiliar with the game, Sachiko Koshimizu is one of nearly 200 idols available in the social network game The Idolmaster Cinderella Girls, which is co-developed by Cygames, Inc. and Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc. In the game, Sachiko is known for her absolute confidence in believing she is the cutest idol of all, often saying things such as, “It’s been decided, I’m the cutest,” and, “It’s obvious I’m the best, right?”

Sachiko was first introduced on January 13, 2012 and is still one of the most popular idols in the game. In 2020, she earned the 12th-place spot in the 9th annual Cinderella Girl General Election.

Elon Musk tweeted an image of Sachiko which includes the caption, “Hey you, yeah you king. You’re gonna make it.” He also typed the caption out himself in the tweet, but changed the word “king” to “queen.” After seeing his post, Japanese Twitter was abuzz with users posting messages such as, “So that’s who Sachiko Koshimizu’s producer was,” and, “Looks like Bandai Namco Entertainment’s stock went up thanks to this tweet.”

The caption, “Hey you, yeah you king. You’re gonna make it,” does not seem to be a major meme. Twitter users were also quick to notice that there are very few examples of the image of Sachiko Koshimizu posted by Elon Musk online, leading to rumors that he may have created this particular image himself. Even after doing a reverse image search, this particular image shows up only a few times, and many of those have captions written in Spanish.

There is one example of the caption “Hey you, yeah you king. You’re gonna make it,” being used with an image of Riamu Yumemi on a coffee mug (this is most likely unofficially), but it is more than likely this meme is not a mainstream one. Judging from the kinds of posts Elon Musk has made in the past, it is hard to imagine him taking a screenshot and editing it himself. In addition, this very same image seems to have first appeared online toward the end of March of 2020.

The screenshot above is from a Facebook post on March 28, 2020 by an account known as Weebs and Their Memes. The image’s caption and composition match that of the one in Elon Musk’s post exactly. Musk also has a history of reposting images created by others without offering any context. Furthermore, the existence of the aforementioned coffee mug seems to indicate the caption used in this image is some kind of minor internet meme. Either way, it’s probably safe to say that Musk’s tweet of Sachiko Koshimizu is a repost.

[UPDATE 1/13/2021 8:31 PM] Twitter user @dadanpo_imas discovered an even earlier example of this image being used in a Facebook post in November 2019 originating in Mexico.

Elon Musk has been known to post tweets relating to Japanese anime—Your Name and Neon Genesis Evangelion to name a couple—as well as games. (Nlab/ねとらぼ Article) It is also interesting to note that January 13, the day of Musk’s tweet, is the same day Sachiko Koshimizu was originally implemented as a character in The Idolmaster Cinderella Girls. The odds of this being a coincidence are quite small, so even ignoring the question of whether or not Elon Musk himself plays as Sachiko Koshimizu’s producer in the game, it seems quite likely that he is at least familiar with who Sachiko is and what game she is from.

Who would have imagined such a stir could arise from the world’s richest man crossing paths with that of The Idolmaster Cinderella Girl’s self-proclaimed cutest idol.