Look how proud Elon Musk’s mother is of her son’s car company:
Definitely wow 😮 @Tesla 👏👏👏 https://t.co/ZTbkZq2wSu
– Maye Musk (@mayemusk) October 25, 2025
There’s nothing wrong with a mother praising her billionaire son – who among us wouldn’t do the same? – but the message it embeds is rubbish. The one who deserves praise here is Matthew Topchian, a quick-thinking human motorist who took evasive action using his hands and feet, made of flesh and blood.
A military propeller plane made a shaky emergency landing Thursday, followed by a crash on a dusty road on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. Two people were on board, but none were injured. However, a fire broke out when the plane collided with two electricity poles. It also buzzed a Tesla minding its own business, narrowly avoiding disaster. (This type of plane is also used to destroy coca leaf crops in South America).
Today, Maye Musk is just one of countless Tesla fans on Elon Musk’s X applauding the company’s assisted driving mode for skillfully avoiding a tragic collision between vehicles that could cost lives.
The problem is, according to a message from the guy driving the car, he was driving the old fashioned way and thinks if he hadn’t it would have crashed.
The message for Problem
On TikTok, where the near miss was originally posted by a guy named Matthew Topchian (whose identity was confirmed by his local news channel), a response asked whether the car was in manual or autonomous mode, and Topchian’s response was emphatic: “Manually the fsd is really good but it would have absolutely destroyed this plane..” Translation of hastily-typing-on-a-smartphone-ese: I drove manually. Although Tesla’s assistant driving mode is excellent, if I had used it at the time, I am convinced the plane would have been tragically destroyed.
Post “I’m going to have to hear Matthew himself say that he wasn’t driving in fully self-driving because that’s not the story I heard,” Bellow wrote. Additionally, he said, “the note only references a comment on a TikTok and the only video on that TikTok account is this video. This could be a bot account or maybe Matthew likes the idea of people thinking he’s a racing driver and changed his initial story.“Sure, yeah, totally!”
Bellow’s message is absolutely taken as fact. It received millions of views, and the text of the quote tweet includes some rather terrifying and misinformed statements like “The Tesla self-driving car has reached a level of safety that I didn’t think would be possible for another decade,and “The autopilot dodged a plane.” It’s not autonomous driving, it’s situational awareness on wheels…”
