Who is Yilong Ma? Viral Elon Musk ‘doppelganger’ has TikTok obsessed

Elon Musk has a lookalike garnering millions of views on TikTok, but not everyone is convinced by Yilong Ma and his copycat antics.

Yilong Ma/Elong Musk is a Chinese TikToker who’s been taking the platform by storm of late.

With just eight videos and tens of millions of views, the creator posts videos addressing the internet with a striking similarity to billionaire Elon Musk.

As the deepfake phenomenon takes hold on TikTok, with Robert Pattinson and Tom Cruise sparking their own replicas, skepticism is heavy over Yilong Ma’s authenticity.

The content creator has only switched over to TikTok and English language content after being banned from Weibo and Douyin, the Chinese language versions of Twitter and TikTok.

Bytedance, the parent company owning both Douyin and TikTok has not released a statement as to why the wannabe Musk was banned, but continues to allow Yilong to post on TikTok unimpeded.

The videos themselves are innocent enough in nature. Mostly featuring Yilong calling himself “Elon Musk’s Chinese Twin” and speaking in phonetic English.

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After being spotted by Elon Musk himself, the Tesla owner reached out and said he’d be willing to meet Yilong “If he is real,”  throwing doubt by admitting it’s “hard to tell with deepfakes these days.”

Deepfake or not, the TikToks exist as hilarious breakdowns of Elon Musk’s market movements through a language barrier.  Yilong’s breakdown of Musk’s purchase of Twitter consists of him saying: “Hi everyone, my bird, my bird. I love you” while holding a cut out of the blue Twitter logo.

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With deepfake technology becoming more accessible than ever, and AR filters developing at an incredible speed, it’s only going to get tougher to determine what’s real and what isn’t. It’s likely that Elon won’t be the last celebrity to have a ‘doppelganger’ pop up out of the blue.