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Elon Musk tweets, deletes silly Cybertruck banana photo

It must have lost its a-peel.

Amanda Kooser
Freelance writer Amanda C. Kooser covers gadgets and tech news with a twist for CNET. When not wallowing in weird gear and iPad apps for cats, she can be found tinkering with her 1956 DeSoto.
Amanda Kooser
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This Elon Musk Cybertruck-banana tweet mysteriously disappeared.

Screenshot by Amanda Kooser/CNET

We should have waited a few more days before publishing our top-10 weirdest Elon Musk tweets of 2019. The and SpaceX founder dropped a gem on Twitter on Thursday showing what appeared to be a photoshopped banana duct-taped to the butt of his Cybertruck. It didn't last long.

"Art in motion," Musk wrote. The tweet quickly racked up thousands of likes and retweets before unceremoniously disappearing.

Watch this: Tesla Cybertruck: First ride in the pickup of the future

Musk hadn't suddenly become a fan of fruit salad on wheels. The banana was a reference to an art piece titled "The Comedian" by prankster-artist Maurizio Cattelan, which sold for $120,000 at a Miami gallery earlier this month. The art consisted of a real banana duct-taped to a wall.

If we put together the estimated cost of a top-of-the-line Cybertruck with the going rate for art-fruit, then that would rocket Musk's vehicle value up to around $200,000. Too bad it's not real.

The original banana-less image traces back to Twitter user Cody Simms, who posted the picture on Dec. 7. Simms said he snapped the photo from the back seat of a Lyft near LAX in Los Angeles.

The tweet's mysterious disappearance is odd. Is Musk making a statement about the impermanence of art? Did he borrow the photoshopped version from elsewhere and then think better of it?

Whatever happened behind the scenes, we can be pretty sure that a duct-taped banana won't be an official Tesla add-on option for the electric pickup.

Tesla Cybertruck is like nothing else, and it'll be built in Austin

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