What was Elon Musk doing during 25-minute 'meeting' with Anwar?

Just how well did yesterday's "meeting" between Elon Musk and Anwar Ibrahim go? 

The prime minister had built up momentum for the meeting days earlier, saying the billionaire entrepreuner had requested a session with him.

It turned out that the meeting was virtual, in the form of a video conference.

According to the Prime Minister's Office, the call began at 9.30am, and lasted 25 minutes, and was attended by ministers Tengku Zafrul Aziz and Fahmi Fadzil.

This was followed by a statement from Anwar himself, who listed what he had relayed to Musk and congratulated him for opening a Tesla sales office in Selangor.

However, the prime minister's statement made no mention of what Musk had said during the call.

A local software engineer decided to check if Musk had issued any statements about the meeting on Twitter, the social media platform he owns.

Colin Charles narrowed down his search between 9.30am and 9.55am, the time during which the meeting with the Malaysian government was said to have taken place.

He found several tweets from Musk replying to unrelated subjects and listed five of them, giving the timestamp of each.

"Elon was clearly bored with the conversation as he was tweeting; timestamps don't lie," Charles concluded.

Musk's tweets included one-liners such as "You can do that too", "Cool" and "Good summary", the last in praise of a review comparing Twitter and Meta.

Just three minutes before his meeting with Anwar ended, Musk posted an emoji of a face with tears of joy in reaction to a lighthearted tweet.

Contacted by MalaysiaNow to elaborate further, Charles compared Musk's behaviour during his meeting with Anwar to how he had responded after meeting Indonesian President Joko Widodo in May last year.

"It was an honor to meet at Starbase and discuss exciting future projects!" Musk tweeted after meeting Jokowi at his SpaceX site in Texas.

In contrast, Charles said Anwar's session with Musk was a "25-minute call and not a face-to-face meeting".

He also reminded Anwar that efforts to woo Musk to invest in Malaysia were started by the previous government.

In May last year, then prime minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob headed a high-powered trade delegation to Washington, where he invited Tesla to invest and manufacture its electric cars in Malaysia.

During the tour, then international trade and industry minister Mohamed Azmin Ali also met with representatives from SpaceX-affiliated company Starlink and received a tour of the SpaceX facility in Los Angeles.