Elon Musk amuses followers with tweet about Romania and Chad flags

Chad and Romania separated by thousands of miles continents and share few historical links, apart, that is, from the colours in their flags.

Apart from fa small variation in shades, the two nations'' flags appear identical — a fact Tesla CEO Elon Musk was delighted to discover and share with his millions of followers on Twitter:

Romania initially displayed a flag with horizontal stripes of blue, yellow, and red before settling on its current vertical design in 1861.

While almost 100 years later, Chad designed its own flag design after gaining independence from France in 1959.

The country initially considered a green, yellow, and red design but quickly discovered Mali had already taken this pattern. It then swapped the green for the blue — creating a flag that was almost identical to Romania's.

Chad's flag is not the only one to resemble other flags — Mali, the country Chad tried to avoid copying, is similar to Senegal's — with a single star in the middle appears to separate the two flags. Guinea's also replicates Mali's design but is reversed.

Both Indonesia and Monaco fly two horizontal stripes: red over white, while Poland uses white over red.

Ireland and Ivory Coast share the same design, but it is flipped on the vertical axis.

All of these similarities may have stemmed from coincidence, but other flags have a specific reason for slight variations to a theme.

Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia all sport the same colours because they used to be part of the same country of Gran Colombia, which dissolved in 1822.

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