Elon Musk posted a low-resolution video to his 140 million Twitter followers in which he is barely visible — prompting users to mock the highly pixelated clip by calling the mogul “8-Bit Elon.”
Musk on Tuesday began livestreaming from Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.
The tech titan told his followers that he was testing out Twitter’s livestreaming feature in order to look for areas of improvement.
Musk smiled and laughed in astonishment as he observed that the livestreaming feature “works.”
A Twitter staffer seen nearby is overheard telling Musk that the livestream was powered by the same code that underpinned the app Periscope, the live video straming app that launched in 2015 and was eventually acquired by Twitter.
“This is 2015 Periscope code,” Musk said. “It basically works.”
“We’re just testing the live video feature so we can see if it works, and we can modify it accordingly,” he said.
“Just improve the resolution.”
Periscope was discontinued in 2021 due to declining usage and the high cost of keeping it operating.
“It’s pretty low res, we definitely need to improve resolution,” Musk said in the clip.
“That’s exactly right. That’s why we wanted to take it out because we haven’t fixed it in like 8 years,” said a Twitter employee.
When Musk is told that there are 27,000 people watching him, he said: “Hello, everyone!”
Eventually, the viewer count soars to 150,000 people before it crashes altogether.
Twitter users teased Musk, comparing him to the 8-bit video games that were popular in the 1980s and 1990s.
Others noted that he spent more than $44 billion to buy Twitter only for the app to offer a low-resolution streaming option.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
