Pedestrian crossings over several cities in Silicon Valley were disturbed over the weekend by unauthorized audio messages imitating Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which received investigations from local authorities.
According to BBCThe events reported in Palo Alto, Redwood City and Menlo Park, home to Meta’s headquarters, involved replacing standard pedestrian crossing instructions with satirical and often bisarre greetings that mimic the voices of the two prominent figures.
“You know they say that money can’t buy happiness, and … I guess it’s true. God knows I’ve tried,” A message that mimics the 53-year-old owner of SpaceX said, reportedly welcomes Palo Alto, where Telsa operations are based.
Another Musk -Postponement offered a Tesla Cybertruck to pedestrians who agreed to be his friend.
Meanwhile, a fake Zuckerberg message presented itself as “The Zuck” and discussed integrating AI “into any facet of your conscious experience.”
California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) confirmed that about 10 pedestrian crossings in Menlo Park and Palo Alto were affected.
Pedro Quintana, a Caltrans spokesman, stated that the sound features of these crossings have been disabled and the activation buttons have been disabled, returning the systems to a timer -based operation.
Although it is still unclear who created the messages or how they ended up being played from the crossings, officials in the affected areas said that engineers were investigating how the crossings were manipulated with.
None of the technical billionaire has commented on the incident.
In addition, the city of Palo Alto reported that at least 12 crossings were affected in the center.
Meghan Horrigan-Taylor, a spokeswoman for the city, indicated that the city was warned of the malfunction on Saturday and believes the manipulation took place on Friday.
“The city’s staff have disabled the audible function until additional repairs can be made,” she said. “Other traffic signals in the city were controlled and the impact is isolated.”
Local media also reported that several crossings in the Redwood City area were also hacked to sound like the two billionaires.
