- YouTuber Fidias Panayiotou finally met Elon Musk after over three months of trying.
- Panayiotou camped outside Twitter’s headquarters for weeks to get a hug from the CEO.
- He tweeted out a photo of him hugging Musk, adding “we are definitely living in a simulation.”
Content creator Fidias Panayiotou finally met and hugged Elon Musk after turning up to Twitter’s headquarters day after day for months.
Panayiotou was at the building in San Francisco, California, more or less every day from mid October, including 69 consecutive days and an appearance on Christmas.
Along the way he had run-ins with security and faced criticism online from those who labeled his escapade “weird” and “disturbing” in tweets.
He was not even deterred by Musk’s mother Maye weighing in on the situation, describing Panayiotou’s mission as “malicious.”
On January 21, Panayiotou posted a photo to his Twitter of him hugging Musk, seemingly inside the Twitter building.
“We are definitely living in a simulation @elonmusk !” he wrote. “Happy National Hugging Day everyone.”
Musk quote-tweeted it with a hugging emoji.
—Fidias (@Fidias0) January 21, 2023
Panayiotou, who has 1.4 million TikTok followers and 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube, previously told Insider on his 47th day that he would continue trying to hug Musk “until I die.” He admitted it was “annoying” but insisted “I am doing this to show him love.”
Panayiotou’s quest began on October 8, 2022 when he posted a video to Twitter stating he had hugged 99 celebrities, and wanted Musk, who he called his “favorite person in the whole world,” to be number 100.
Musk seemed to respond to Panayiotou at the end of December 2022, saying he had met some kids in Qatar who “had one request, which was to hug this guy who keeps trying to hug me in SF.”
“I checked to see if they were sure about that and they were, so I will,” he said.
—ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) January 21, 2023
