Crosswalks in Silicon Valley Hacked to Talk Like Musk and Zuckerberg

Over the weekend, crosswalk pedestrian signals in the backyard of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were hacked to play voices imitating their likeness. But they were not exactly kind to the billionaires, instead offering a commentary on the heightened polarization and distrust of the two leaders who have become more influential than ever in today’s society and Washington in particular.

“It’s normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated as we forcefully insert AI into every facet of your conscious experience,” said a crosswalk button hacked to sound like Zuckerberg. “I just want to assure you, you don’t need to worry because there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.”

“Hi this is Elon Musk,” begins another. “Welcome to Palo Alto, the home of Tesla engineering. You know the saying ‘money can’t buy happiness,’ I guess that’s true. God knows I’ve tried, but it can buy a Cybertruck and that’s pretty sick, right?” After a pause, the crosswalk continues, “Fuck I’m so alone” to an eruption of laughter in the background.

It is fairly easy to recognize that the voices are synthetic, especially because Musk stutters often, and the voice in the videos enunciates clearly. Sadly, by looking at the comments on TikTok it seems many people cannot get the joke and do not understand it was the consequence of a hack, not an authorized use of the CEOs’ voices. It is less funny when the joke has to be explained.

Officials for Redwood City, California, told Palo Alto Online that it was “actively working to investigate and resolve the issue as quickly as possible.” Comments on social media suggest the problems appear to have been resolved by Monday.

The vendor that makes the voice-enabled crosswalks is reportedly a company called Polara, which offers pedestrian signal buttons that can communicate with crosswalk signals over Bluetooth.

Hacking the audio signals puts the blind and otherwise impaired in some danger, but at least it seems the hackers kept all the necessary alerts in place—the voices of Zuckerberg and Musk play after the signals are read. On the flip side, however, hearing these voices might induce someone to walk into oncoming traffic.

Palo Alto was recently the site of protests against Musk and Tesla over his political ambitions that have made the electric car brand toxic to its original customer base. While many people may think of Fremont, California or Austin, Texas as Tesla’s home, its engineering base is still concentrated in Palo Alto where the company was founded back in 2003.

Americans’ views of both executives tilt more negative than positive, with a recent poll by Pew Research Center finding that just over half of U.S. adults view Musk unfavorably, while a whopping 67% dislike Zuckerberg. Musk, at least, is well-liked by Republicans with 73% favorability for his alignment with President Trump. Zuckerberg is not beloved by either party. Maybe the public sees through his facade and knows Zuckerberg’s political hard-right tilt is nothing more than thinly veiled attempt at a quid-pro-quo. Meta’s anti-trust case, which could see the company forced to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, started on Monday.

It is too bad that the billionaires would not likely hear the crosswalk voices themselves, since walking is, of course, something left to the plebeians.