An AI spoof ad featuring older and heavyset versions of tech billionaires like Elon Musk went viral for promoting a dystopian future where humans power the machines that put them out of work. One of the video’s creators says there’s at least some truth to it.
In the video, aged-up versions of Tesla CEO Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have teamed up to create a new company: Energym, a fictional gym which harvests the energy from laid off humans on stationary bikes and rowing machines to power AI.
Hyper-realistic versions of the tech moguls are interviewed in a documentary-style format where they warn of a future of AI-fueled mass unemployment and promote their Matrix-style human battery startup.
“By 2030, almost 80% of people had lost their jobs,” said the weathered AI version of Musk.
“The less people did physical work, the more they wanted to appear as if they did,” added Altman’s AI double.
Jan De Loore, 42, along with his cofounder Hans Buyse, 52, in 2025 started AiCandy, the Belgium-based creative video agency behind the viral spoof. De Loore said the video took off partly because it taps into two major anxieties people have with AI: its potential to take human jobs and its giant energy requirements.
“Of course, it’s a joke, but in every good joke, there’s a bottom of truth,” he told Fortune.
De Loore said he and Buyse decided to feature Musk, Altman, and Bezos specifically, because, according to him, “they are the face” of AI as well as “the faces of that change that is being brought upon us.”
The video comes at a time when AI job anxiety is on the rise. Though some studies have cast doubt on the correlation between AI and productivity at the macro level, recent moves have worsened people’s worries. CEOs, such as Block cofounder Jack Dorsey, are linking thousands of layoffs with the growing use of “intelligence tools,” just as doomer essays warning AI can replace humans in white collar jobs have heightened people’s fears of an AI doomsday.
While De Loore is unsure if 80% of people will be out of work as the video describes, he said it’s clear we are going to do a lot more work with a lot fewer people in the future.
De Loore said he has already seen how AI can become what he called a “creativity enabler” in his own work.
For most of his 15-year career in advertising, De Loore said bringing a video idea to life involved a very linear procedure of pre-production work, filming, and a post-production process. With AI, this process has been transformed, with much of the work merging into a single process that can change on the fly.
What may have taken a large team and loads of money before, has been streamlined, he said.
“Now I can do it on my own, or with a very small team. We can create amazing stories, visually and also narrative wise.”
Yet, at least for now, the creative side involved with crafting scripts or brainstorming ideas still belongs to humans.
“But I think in any sector, robotics and AI will take over quite a bit of what we do today, I’m sure,” he said.
Meanwhile, De Loore said he and his own company are finding more success than before in convincing clients to use AI in their video advertisements. And yet, De Loore and his company are fighting their own battle to make sure their work stands apart from the AI slop littering the internet. He said they would decline any job where the client’s sole motivation is to make a video cheaper or with fewer people.
“That’s not a good reason to create something in AI,” De Loore said. “We really insist on, and we really love the creative possibilities of AI. It enables us to create things that were impossible before or way too expensive for most companies.”
