Elon Musk joins Westworld SXSW panel to talk about sending cars into space

“Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” It’s the question that permeated the first season of Westworld. So why shouldn’t its SXSW appearance be any different?

To close out its hour-long panel, moderator Jason Tanz (site director for Wired) cued up Westworld series co-creator Jonathan Nolan to bring out his “friend Elon,” which happened to indeed be Elon Musk. Said Nolan:

The thing about spaceflight is all of us working together… and we’re trying to think of an image, something to sort of shock people into thinking about this again. What we came up with was red sports car and a David Bowie song.

Rather than talk about Westworld, Musk instead gave a small speech about how “life cannot just be about solving one miserable problem after another; it needs to be things that inspire you.” You can watch the whole thing in the video below.

The cameo wasn’t entirely random. Both Nolan and series co-creator Lisa Joy worked with Musk to create a short reel of the recent Falcon Heavy launch that also sent a cherry-red Tesla (complete with astronaut driver) floating through space — a reel set, appropriately enough, to David Bowie’s “Starman.”

That being said, if anyone asked you to sum up SXSW in one sentence, “Elon Musk crashing the Westworld panel to talk about the car he sent into space” is a pretty good summation.

In case you’re wondering, Musk has previously been asked whether he’d make his own Westworld after colonizing Mars, to which he joked there were “no immediate plans.” The second season of Westworld premieres April 22nd. The Falcon Heavy and Starman video can be seen below: