Beeple’s Robotic Billionaires Head to Berlin
Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, otherwise known as Beeple, will bring his anthropomorphic billionaire-themed work Regular Animals to National Galerie Berlin next month, following its viral debut at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2025.
The show, titled Beeple. Regular Animals (29 April–10 May), features roaming quadruped robot dogs that move within a pen-like enclosure and bear the faces of global personalities. Tech-billionaires Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos appear alongside artists Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and Beeple himself.
In a statement, Beeple confirmed that the works are designed to offer pointed commentary on Tesla founder Musk, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and Amazon chief executive Bezos. He said: “Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk own algorithms that control what we see and decide how we see the world.
“When they want to make a change, they don’t have to lobby the UN, they don’t have to go to congress, they just make a change.”
The Berlin exhibition marks the first time that the artist has shown in Germany, in a city where Tesla and Amazon both have large manufacturing plants.
The work’s robotic dogs are equipped with hyper-realistic silicon human heads which, when moving through a space, capture their surroundings via in-built cameras.
Images are then printed through the rear of the robots and presented in the “style” associated with each figure. Zuckerberg’s print, for example, appears in the “metaversal” style, where its surroundings are shown in red lasers.
Beeple’s work debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach’s Zero 10 digital art section last December, where it was received with fascination by visitors.
Each robotic figure was priced at cost $100,000 USD dollars (edition of two plus one artist’s proof). By the end of VIP day, every robot had sold.
Regular Animals goes on display at part of Berlin Gallery Weekend and will appear alongside Nam June Paik’s Andy Warhol Robot (1994), in a show curated by Lisa Botti, curator at Neue Nationalgalerie.
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