Rick and Morty recruit Elon Tusk, an alternate universe version of Elon Musk, to be part of their crew in “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty” - and yes, Tusk is voiced by the man himself. The latest episode of Rick and Morty season 4 is an exhaustive takedown of the heist movie genre, in which Rick strips heists down to their individual tropes and creates a machine called Heistatron to automatically generate heists.
Unfortunately, Heistatron has double-crossing built into its programming and soon goes rogue, using nanobots to recruit random people to be part of its crew and executing heists on entire planets. In order to stop Heistatron Rick has to assemble his own crew, which includes a ventriloquist dummy that shoots arrows to carry her voice, a half-melted blacksmith, Professor Poopybutthole, and Elon Tusk, the CEO of Tuskla. Like Elon Musk’s car company, Tesla, Tuskla is in the midst of rolling out a series of innovative new vehicles. Like Elon Tusk, these vehicles all have tusks.
Musk is a big fan of Rick and Morty, and first met with show creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon back in 2017. The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is known for championing futuristic tech ideas, like building a high-speed transportation system called the Hyperloop, or establishing a human colony on Mars. Last year he made headlines when he launched a Tesla Roadster into space, and in August 2019 the Roadster completed its first orbit of the sun. It’s not surprising that Musk is such a fan of Rick and Morty, with its wacky science fiction concepts, or that Roiland and Harmon are fans of Musk in return.
In “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty,” Rick claims that he decided to recruit Elon Tusk because “regular Elon can be a bit controlling.” The only difference between the two versions of Elon is that one of them has tusks and the other doesn’t, but Elon Tusk muses that growing up with tusks may have affected his personality and made him more open to collaborating with others. However, it later turns out that Tusk was picked for the crew completely at random due to an algorithm generated by Rick’s robot Randotron, and he contributes nothing useful to the team.
Rick and Morty is known for having high-profile guest voice stars, which this season have included Sam Neill, Kathleen Turner and Taika Waititi, with Paul Giamatti set for a role in an upcoming episode. Musk actually teased his role in Rick and Morty earlier this year, when he changed his name to “Elon Tusk” on Twitter - though at the time, no one other than the show’s creative team knew what this was referring to. With two episodes left in the first half of Rick and Morty season 4, we can probably expect more surprises like this to come.
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