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At the height of the crypto and blockchain frenzy, an NFT created by digital artist Beeple sold for a staggering $69.5 million. Years later, as the world shifts into the AI era, the artist has struck once again. At the Art Basel Miami Beach, the artist — whose real name is Mike Winkelmann — put robotic dogs on the show floor. But these were not your average dogs. They excreted printed copies of NFTs after capturing images through the chest-mounted cameras. And if that was not already unsettling enough, these robots substituted a robotic canine head with hyper-realistic heads depicting some famous faces like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Fittingly, Andy Warhol also found a place, and so did painting maestro Pablo Picasso. The name of this collection — Regular Animals — is also tastefully ironic. 

The idea sounds weird, but you truly realize the creep factor after seeing these robots with eerily realistic human faces moving around in a glass enclosure. Interestingly, these robotic dogs were up for sale. And surprisingly, the one bearing Beeple’s face was sold before that of Elon Musk, the man who is making the boldest bets about an incoming humanoid robotic revolution, riding atop Tesla’s own Optimus robot. “I thought everybody would be fighting over the Elon one — but mine sold first, and I was very surprised. I thought mine was going to be the last dog. But yeah, to me it’s kind of a self-portrait,” the artist was quoted as saying by The Wall Street Journal. Right now, there’s nothing hotter in the tech segment than AI and robotics. And under the Trump administration, cryptocurrencies (built on the same blockchain foundations as NFTs) are gaining traction once again. Beeple’s art exhibit essentially combines these hot trends and gives them an utterly disturbing spin.

The theme of hybridizing man with machine, but on the body of a beast, is simply as provocative as it gets. And to top it off, combine that with the controversial art form that is NFTs, which continue to be ridiculed as simply a legitimate art form’s digital replica. But here’s the interesting part. Art is supposed to be provocative, and Beeple’s unsettling human-faced robots checked that box well enough that they were sold at $100,000.

“The idea behind the choice of these characters, which are a mix of, sort of, like tech billionaires and artists, is that sort of the role of the artist is to reinterpret the world and, sort of, through their lens. But increasingly, we see the world through the lens of tech billionaires who own powerful algorithms and control what we see and what we don’t see,” Beeple told AFP. Zuckerberg-led Meta and Musk-led Tesla are both deeply invested in robotics, as well as running the world’s biggest social platforms, such as X, Instagram, and Facebook.

The exhibit at Art Basel Miami Beach is called “Regular Animals.” Created by digital designer and artist Mike Winkelmann, who goes by Beeple, it features robot dog versions of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, according to Storyful. pic.twitter.com/5JT4wouBS7

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 6, 2025

One can also see it as a satire, of sorts. Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg are among the richest men on the planet. Moreover, the respective companies they built are now racing against each other in a cutthroat AI race, where AI talent lose their jobs at the whim of leaders, and new heads are being hired with compensation packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s a cruel race towards becoming the top dog in the next big avenue of tech, and it only seems fitting that the competition is artistically brought to life in the most ridiculous way possible. But the fact that it would end up looking as creepy is quite an imaginative feat in itself.