A satirical AI ad featuring aged, heavier versions of tech billionaires like Elon Musk went viral for depicting a dystopian future where humans power the machines that have put them out of work. One of the video’s creators says there’s at least a kernel of truth to it.
In the video, older versions of CEO Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and founder Jeff Bezos team up to launch a new company: Energym, a fictional gym that harvests energy from laid-off humans using stationary bikes and rowing machines to power AI.
Hyper-realistic AI renderings of these tech moguls are interviewed in a documentary-style format, where they warn of an AI-driven future of mass unemployment and promote their Matrix-like 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, and his cofounder Hans Buyse, 52, launched AiCandy—the Belgium-based creative video agency behind the viral spoof—in 2025. De Loore said the video took off partly because it taps into two major public anxieties about AI: its potential to take human jobs and its .
“Of course, it’s a joke, but in every good joke, there’s a bottom of truth,” he told .
De Loore said he and Buyse chose to feature Musk, Altman, and Bezos specifically because, in his view, “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-related job anxiety is on the rise. Though some studies have cast doubt on the correlation at the macro level, recent developments have worsened people’s worries. CEOs like cofounder Jack Dorsey are with the growing use of “intelligence tools,” just as warning AI can replace humans in white-collar jobs have heightened people’s .
While De Loore isn’t sure if 80% of people will be out of work as the video describes, he said it’s clear we’ll do much more work with far fewer people in the future.
De Loore said he’s already seen how AI can act as what he calls a “creativity enabler” in his own work.
For most of his 15-year advertising career, De Loore said bringing a video idea to life involved a strictly linear process: pre-production, filming, and post-production. With AI, this workflow has been transformed, merging many steps into a single, on-the-fly process.
What once required a large team and significant funding has been streamlined, he noted.
“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 aspects—like crafting scripts or brainstorming ideas—still belong 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 his company is finding more success than ever in convincing clients to use AI in their video ads. Still, De Loore and his team are fighting to ensure their work stands apart from the . He said they’d 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.”