A Look Back At Elon Musk's Cameo In Young Sheldon

Not only is "The Big Bang Theory" entertaining, but it's also accurate — even scientists think so. The show's correctly depicted science is largely due to UCLA professor David Saltzberg, an astroparticle physicist who checked all the scripts and ensured that even the whiteboard equations were real, per NPR. The scientific details were only enhanced by many celebrated real-life professionals who made cameos on the show — e.g., Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Nye, to name a few. In keeping with their cameo traditions, "TBBT" spinoff "Young Sheldon" delegated the bit to SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Before his toxic friendship with President Donald Trump, Musk made a special appearance at the end of Season 1, Episode 6 of "Young Sheldon" (via YouTube). After Sheldon explains a theoretical solution to land NASA rocket boosters, the episode cuts to decades later in 2016, where CNN is praising Musk for SpaceX being the first to successfully land a booster back on Earth. Musk's hilarious cameo followed the news clip, where he could be seen sitting at his desk at SpaceX headquarters, reading a notebook titled: "Rocket Reentry & Retropopulsion by Sheldon Lee Cooper." After Musk's assistant tells him a reporter from CNN arrived, the Tesla CEO quickly shoved the equation-filled notebook in his desk drawer and nonchalantly said, "Send him in."

It wasn't the first time the tech mogul guest-starred in the "TBBT" universe. In Season 9, Episode 9 of "The Big Bang Theory," Howard splits a piece of pie with Musk while washing dishes at a local soup kitchen's Thanksgiving Day feast.

Thanks to this one joke, the prophetic writing on "Young Sheldon" is up there with "The Simpsons"-level predictions. In October 2024, seven years after Elon Musk's guest appearance on the sitcom, SpaceX accomplished an incredible feat of engineering. The company launched its Starship vehicle, then successfully landed its Super Heavy rocket booster back onto the launch pad using metal appendages also known as "chopsticks," per CBS News — make no mistake, it was Sheldon's idea first!

Ironically, Musk deemed the historic moment "science fiction without the fiction part" (via PBS News). Lest we forget, he played out this exact moment in a fictional universe before making it a scientific reality. All jokes aside, SpaceX executed a major step toward reusable launch systems, as well as Musk's out-of-this-world (pun intended) idea proposing interplanetary human existence. Boasting about his triumph at the time, the X owner wrote on the platform: "Big step towards making life multiplanetary was made today." If such a historic moment in human evolution happens, we know Sheldon will be the first one in line with his application to live on Mars.