Lex Luthor Trends on Twitter After Jeff Bezos Tests New Robotics Technology

When a bald, billionaire industrialist starts playing around with oversized robot arms, it's usually just about time to call in Superman. Today, that fact was not lost on hundreds of Twitter users, who all tweeted variations on the same joke when Amazon chief Jeff Bezos tried out a new robotics system -- and reminded basically everyone of Lex Luthor, the supervillain/antihero/President of the United States/New God from DC Comics. The comparisons were mostly made in jest (although there were surely some who really did think Amazon is looking to take over the world), and they were mostly pretty funny (as long as Miss Tessmacher wasn't watching for who laughs, in which case we don't approve at all).

One of the most interesting things about this particualr trend is how remarkably uniform most of the tweets were. When, for instance, Jeff Goldblum tweeted after a fly made an unexpected splash during the U.S. vice presidential debate (yep -- that's a sentence we wrote), the variety of tweets and gags was pretty broad. Here, the tone was set with one tweet that didn't mention Lex at all, but the jokes all kind of ended the same way after that.

You can see the tweet in question here.

Nothing against @JeffBezos but this is the stuff of evil genius villians 🙃 pic.twitter.com/07y7bHPyTK

— hardmaru (@hardmaru) October 5, 2020

Now, it's fair enough to see some Lex in here -- after all, he famously has that fancy green suit of armor, so robotics are definitely part of his arsenal (during the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths era when that suit was less common, he had Team Luthor wearing a platoon of similar ones) -- but it's worth noting that at least a handful of folks also pointed out that those big metallic arms are really more Otto Octavius than Lex Luthor.

Unfortunately for ol' Doc Ock, the bald billionaire part is really hard to get past, and so Bezos made a very particular impression on the social media landscape earlier today. That impression? Mostly just hundreds and hundreds people stating in various degrees of exasperation, humor, or whatever, "so we can agree this guy is Lex Luthor now, right?" Even though it's the same basic gag, some folks found fun ways to riff on it, and if there's anything we like better than Lex Luthor jokes, it's collecting the ones that don't suck for our audience.

Check out the reactions from around Twitter below.