After quoting Lawrence of Arabia, Weyland lists humankind's major technological breakthroughs before a captivated audience, he lays out the company's ambitious plans for the future, stressing the tale of Prometheus and apotheosis of man in his talk.
[9] A three-minute preceding opening, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was made available via a hidden Easter egg link to the website "Whatis101112.com" during the closing credits of Prometheus, released on June 11, 2012.
[11][12] On March 6, 2012, the Weyland website was updated to allow visitors to "invest" in TED 2023 as part of an online game, which would reveal new media in promotion of Prometheus.
[13] Matt Goldberg of Collider complimented TED 2023 as "a clever and captivating piece of viral marketing [which] makes me want a spin-off featuring just [Peter] Weyland", while lauding Guy Pearce's "hypnotic [performance] as the ambitious, eloquent, and somewhat terrifying CEO",[3] while Jordan Raup of The Film Stage praised the film as "a breath of fresh air" compared to "so many [other] viral campaigns seemingly going through the motions".
[14] In a 2023 retrospective, Toussaint Egan of Polygon called TED 2023 as "weird premonition in itself", noting it as "just one example of how the inexorable march of time has eclipsed the wildest prognostications of speculative fiction [with] the most interesting thing about the video [being] not its thematic or narrative relationship to Prometheus, but how it stands as an inadvertent time capsule of a moment in our collective culture when tech CEOs were, as a whole, held in a much higher regard", in particular in comparison to Elon Musk, "Silicon Valley's wealthiest pariah", who is noted like Pearce's portrayal of Peter Weyland as "a man who wants to do whatever he wants, and [to] be adored for being the guy who can do whatever he wants", before concluding to call the film "a fascinating touchstone of sci-fi popular culture and Hollywood ephemera [that is] more than worth revisiting, if not to put into stark relief the ways in which our collective culture's depiction of tech CEOs has or has not evolved, then just to see Guy Pearce hamming it up as Weyland in all his vainglorious glory".