A 30-foot long, 12,000 lb metal sculpture featuring Elon Musk’s face atop the body of a goat riding a rocket has been spotted on the streets of Austin, Texas (via Fox Business).
The statue was commissioned by a group of cryptocurrency enthusiasts who created a project called the “Elon Goat Token.” They wanted the sculpture to honor Musk’s contributions to cryptocurrency (the goat body is a reference to the term GOAT, a colloquialism for “Greatest Of All Time”) and plan to present it to Musk as a gift.
20-year metal sculptor Kevin Stone was hired to build the sculpture earlier this year. While the folks that commissioned it wanted the sculpture in three to five months, Stone originally quoted a timeline of one to two years. He got the job done in about six months, though.
Stone was responsible for sculpting the enormous metal bust of Musk’s head, with the goat body and rocket ship being made by other sculptors. Everything was later merged into one statue, and the whole thing cost $600,000 to create.
“The idea was to design this sculpture to grab everybody’s attention and advertise their crypto,” said Stone. “They plan on driving the sculpture around to market the project as a giant Elon NFT brought to life.”
The sculpture was assembled on a trailer that is being driven around Musk’s hometown of Austin. It was even parked outside Tesla’s headquarters, which officially moved to Austin last year, for a while, but is yet to garner any attention from the celebrity billionaire.
“They hope that it will not only trigger media interest but establish a token that will stick around unlike other crypto tokens that have come and gone and are not here for the long haul,” added Stone.
The people behind “Elon Goat Token” are yet to make contact with the man himself. Musk currently has his hands pretty full as owner and CEO of Twitter, which he acquired last month and has since been trying to reform. He even sold billions in Tesla stock earlier this month to “save” Twitter.
