AI image of Musk smoking with other tech giants as the “$1 trillion squad” goes viral

Elon Musk

A new AI-generated image has swept across social platforms: Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, and Tim Cook hanging out in a moody parking lot, puffing cigars and leaning against luxury cars. Dubbed the "$1 trillion squad" by users on X, the surreal scene went viral in just hours, bouncing between meme pages, AI communities, and pop culture threads.

According to NDTV, the images were most likely generated with the help of Google's AI tools, such as Grok or Nano Banana Pro. One version shows them in a slick, shadowy parking space surrounded by high-end vehicles, including a Cybertruck, as smoke lazily curls through the air while Musk holds a cigar. Another places them in a very different, much humble setting: a small, wood-panelled room, mismatched furniture, a microwave on a side table, and plastic chairs suggesting some kind of low-budget motel get-together.

A third version leans into cinematic drama. In it, the billionaires walk together down a dimly lit street, bathed in the glow of sparse streetlights. The scene feels straight out of a video game or an action movie: powerful, enigmatic, and slightly dystopian.

Social media reactions have ranged from bemusement to existential wit. Many users treated the photos as a kind of cheeky tech-fantasy fiction. Others used them to lean into broader conversations about AI's unchecked creative power. As various sources put it, the uncanny realism of the images "blurred lines between fact and fiction," making many initially wonder if the photos showed a real secret CEO summit.

It's a frenzy that analysts say reflects the culture of the moment. Billionaire tech leaders have become similarly mythic figures, described not just as real-world powerhouses but as near-superheroes or movie-style overlords. That hyperreal images of them were created with AI tools reinforces how the technology is reshaping more than tech-it is reshaping imagination itself.

While the images are all fabricated, it underlines growing public fascination with generative AI. As tools such as Grok and Nano Banana Pro gain in popularity, so do questions about the ethics of digital likeness creation, the spread of convincing deepfakes, and how memes are now inseparable from tech power.