A new biographical book on Elon Musk has been released by famous author Walter Isaac, and it details something rather interesting in regard to the video game industry. The book states that during Cyberpunk 2077′s development, Musk attended one of the recording voice sessions, specifically one that was being conducted by his then-girlfriend Claire Elise Boucher, otherwise known as the famous musician Grimes. Grimes, who voices the character Lizzy Wizzy in the game, was recording dialogue for the role when Musk arrived to the studio and was “wielding a 200-year-old gun.” The book also claimed that Musk demanded a role in the game, something which CD Projekt Red ended up doing by using his likeness for an orderly during the intro section.
“When Grimes was doing the voice recordings for the cyborg pop star she played in the video game Cyberpunk 2077, he showed up at the studio wielding a two-hundred-year-old gun and insisted that they give him a cameo.” – Walter Isaacson, author of the Elon Musk memoir pic.twitter.com/60ZrlHjjtb
— IGN (@IGN) September 19, 2023
In the book, Grimes is quoted by Isacc, saying that by him bringing a gun made the situation extremely tense. “the studio guys were, like, sweating.” she said. The book also quotes Musk himself with an attempt to calm down the developers who saw him with a gun during the session. “I told them that I was armed but not dangerous,” he said. As we already mentioned, the studio did include Musk into the game as a cameo character. However, this supposed NPC is also part of an interesting side quest of Cyberpunk 2077. The player can accept a quest from Grime’s character, Lizzy Wizzy, who asks them to keep an eye on her boyfriend, who also happens to be her manager.
The quest ends with a twist. Instead of finding her boyfriend cheating on her, the player hears them talking with another person about backing a digital version of Wizzy’s consciousness in case her career stops suddenly. If the player brings this information back to Wizzy, she’ll decide to kill her boyfriend. The player is then tasked with dumping the body of the Musk-look alike into a trash bin. In the book, Isaac compares the game’s cybernetic implants to “a sci-fi version of what [Musk] was doing at Neuralink.” This is emphasized by another quote from Musk in the book where he says that “It hit close to home.”
As far as getting a studio to give you a role in their major AAA title, this is arguably one of the most unique/strangest ways to do it. There were also some interesting tidbits that the biography mentioned, one of the most noteworthy being that Musk and Grimes had a third child that no one apparently knew about. Neither Musk nor CD Projekt Red have made any official comment in regards to this incident.