Last Friday, news broke across the web that Tesla founder Elon Musk died in a tragic lithium battery explosion. As a result, #RipElon trended on Twitter throughout the day. A set of blurry images, allegedly taken at the moment of death, began making the rounds, as well as several screenshotted headlines seeming to confirm the death, a myriad of memes making a mockery of the situation, a Tweet from Musk’s wife Grimes mourning his death and even a Meme Heaven image adding Musk to the group of infamous dead meme legends like Harambe and Stan Lee.

The tone was confusing, to say the least, especially for someone just seeing the news on their Twitter trending dash. Some users were torn on what to believe, sparking a lot of arguments on the site about the actual status of Musk, with many prepared to defend the fact that he was dead and gone.

At 5:37 p.m. EST, Elon Musk silenced the rumors with a simple eye roll emoji, confirming he was alive and summing up his opinions on what was now quickly revealing itself to be a massively successful death hoax. The event resulted in a considerable amount of media attention, including stories from Futurism, Screen Rant, Tech Times, Al Jazeera and The Sun, to name just a few. It also resulted in a lot of angry Elon fans and stock market investors, who almost immediately began accusing whoever started the hoax of doing so to manipulate the market. Some even called for the hoax to be looked into by the FBI, a rumor which made its way into articles on sites like Yahoo! and Sputnik.

At 5:44 p.m., Tomfootballbrady – an experienced troll who we spoke to back in January about his history of raids against power-hungry Reddit super-moderators and the invention of the Whooky Sack – sent me a DM. It said: “Hey just to let you know, me and the gang were behind the whole Elon death thing that took place today. If people pin it on 4chan it’s not true.”

He then set me up in a group chat with himself and the other troll masterminds behind the hoax: Dabroman72, woomy_2 (30k+ followers), Cloakerson (27k+ followers), Patrick (who runs an Instagram meme page with a large number of followers) RunThatBall, bruhsalmon and u/RemarkableRhombus. He also gave me access to “peniswater,” a Discord group (run by Tomfootballbrady and Dabroman72, another of the big pieces in #RipElon) consisting of hundreds of dedicated trolls, the foot soldiers that brought #RipElon to such a fast victory. This is what they had to say:

Q: So, how did #RipElon start? How did the plan come about?

RunThatBall: u/RemarkableRhombus suggested it after we finished the r/nascar and r/burgers raids, and we started to build on that idea as an actual hoax we could spread.

Dabroman72: This [below] might be the first mention of it. Rhombus is a member of our Discord server, peniswater, and suggested it three days ago after the r/nascar raid.

Cloakerson: I first heard about it on [March] 2nd, I was in my server and Tomfootballbrady popped in and said something about it. I suggested we wait until later so more people would see it and we could have more time to make fake headlines.

dabroman72: Yeah, we originally planned to raid /r/elonmusk but we didn’t do it immediately, we decided to wait until (March 5th) at 10:30 a.m. EST for a few reasons. We needed more time to prepare (plan, make fake headlines, etc). We wanted to do it during the daytime, not at night. We wanted to find subreddits other than /r/elonmusk because of /r/elonmusk's stricter moderation and requirements.

RunThatBall: Yeah, especially considering most of peniswater’s Reddit accounts got banned the days following the /r/nascar raid. We needed subs with fewer posting requirements.

Cloakerson: Yeah, the night before #RipElon sort of consisted of me and a good few people attempting small proof-of-concept raids.

u/RemarkableRhombus: I thought Elon would be a fun target because I know how much Redditors idolize him and I figured he was a big enough target to get a reaction from due to his knowledge of internet and meme culture. I didn't expect such a large-scale event, and my original suggestion was to just have a small raid on Elon-related subs, however, others thought we should wait to attack so we could prepare a larger amount of shenanigans and therefore get a larger reaction.

Q: What is peniswater exactly?

Dabroman72: Peniswater is a trolling and shitposting group started in 2019 by me and Tomfootballbrady. It started as a subreddit (r/peniswater) which has now been banned. We live on through the Discord.

RunThatBall: Yeah, it's basically just the Discord where we've been organizing all this.

Cloakerson: My favorite thing about peniswater is that there's so little infighting since there's always someone else to be fucking with. It's a cross-section of people united under a common goal of mischief.

RunThatBall: Yeah, peniswater is really interesting because, despite everyone being trolls, none of them actually target each other much. The only real admins for the discord server are Tom and dabroman. I think it’s funny to watch people in on the joke defend the claims that Elon is dead because we’ve created this culture of irony and trolling in peniswater and cloakercord (Cloakerson’s Discord server). I think calling peniswater a hive mind doesn’t do it justice. They pumped this stuff out in probably like, two hours.

Tomfootballbrady: Imagine those aliens from Toy Story but they’re all geniuses as individuals as well.

RunThatBall: It’s an ant colony of Reddit trolls. We don’t even have to tell them how to troll, they just know at this point.

Cloakerson: We turn them in a direction and they're like termites. They just eat everything in their path. But they've got this actual like thought and quality in it, too.

Dabroman72: Yeah, the idea was u/RemarkableRhombus’, we just helped organize it.

RunThatBall: They’ve all seen enough Tomfootballbrady posts to know exactly what to do.

Dabroman72: Originally screenshots of our posts would blow up on subreddits like /r/comedyheaven or /r/lostredditors or other meme subs and we built the community off that. That’s also where fortnitebruh37 came from, creator of the whooky sack. Now it’s mostly from Instagram.

RunThatBall: Cloakercord might be like way ahead of the curve on memes and create a good few of them, but this is an army of irony geniuses.

Cloakerson: Cloakercord is miles ahead in most things but peniswater puts them into action.

RunThatBall: I mean, we did basically make Floppa. And hood irony has a lot of roots in Cloakercord, too. Wabungus, too.

Cloakerson: In Cloakercord we have the creator of Hey Peter Burger King Foot Lettuce Sprite Cranberry funny fish Friday, and wabungus.

Dabroman72: I really like peniswater‘s interactivity and action, I think that’s what exploded the growth of it.

RunThatBall: There’s a ton of active members in it which is crazy for how big it is.

Cloakerson: It's a very purpose-built server as opposed to something like cloakercord that's more of a hangout, Which is why it works so well. You get like 30+ people in a VC at once. Hardly any rules and hardly any chaos.

Cloakerson: It'll be interesting how the influx of people will affect what we decide to do next.

Dabroman72: Yeah the raids started small, the first one was r/burgers in 2019 which was basically just 5 of the OG members shitposting relentlessly.

RunThatBall: r/burgers this time was probably about 30 people. Still small, but nothing compared to the Elon raid. most of us come from completely different walks of life but we’re all together for Reddit trolling.

Cloakerson: The joke for the past five years or so is that we're the Instagram shadow government. Patrick literally just made sprite cranberry to force a meme. I've known woomy_2y and Patrick for maybe six years now.

RunThatBall: Our friend made “hoes mad”, And then hambubger made funny fishes and Floppa.

Cloakerson: And we're close with a guy in siivagunner who made the “We Are Number One” meme.

RunThatBall: A large part of memes from the past 2 or 3 years originate from Cloakercord in one way or another. Just about anything we do at this point is repeated at least a few times.

Cloakerson: It's kind of fucked honestly. I'll start getting into a game and then I’ll post about it and it'll show up everywhere. I'm pretty sure it's just because of the way stuff is diffused on IG. A lot of my old friends have sizable followings, so they repost and things spread.

Q: What’s the story behind the /r/Nascar raid?

Dabroman72: So, Tuesday (March 2nd) was right after Tomfootballbrady promoted the Discord again on his Instagram, which made the server blow up. A lot of people started raiding places and going from one sub to another really quickly. We hit /r/darkacademia, /r/fluffy_abuse, /r/kayaking, /r/nascar, /r/burgers, and /r/truebingus. The goal of these was to lock as many subs as possible, like get the mods to restrict posting in some way.

RunThatBall: Yeah, peniswater absolutely exploded overnight following the /r/kayaking and /r/astrology raids

Cloakerson: Last night we went after /r/boating and /r/aviation and tried to make them fight each other. What happened today could be considered the end of a good month of trying to screw with Reddit consistently.

RunThatBall: Yeah, this is what /r/bingus has been leading up to, honestly.

Cloakerson: The Bingus takeover gave peniswater a really big boost in numbers.

Dabroman72: These factors led up to #RipElon: 1. /r/bingus and other antics increase tomfootballbrady follower count and peniswater’s following. 2. Peniswater allies with Instagram pages with high follower counts (Cloakerson, Patrick). 3. Spirits and momentum are high. 4. Tombrady posts Discord link on Instagram. 5. Many people join and go crazy, a hive mind raiding a ton of subs. 6. Elon musk idea.

Q: Can you give me a rundown of the /r/Bingus takeover?

Dabroman72: Basically, we owned /r/bingus before Bingus became a meme. We just thought it was a funny word, redditrequested (a process by which you request ownership of inactive subs) the sub, and used it to shitpost for a while.

Cloakerson: I tried to act like an insane Reddit moderator on /r/bingus and declared martial law a few times, converted it into Saul and Sprout Moles a few times.

Patrick: Yea I was just about to say, /r/Bingus turned into a Better Call Saul shitpost subreddit.

RunThatBall: Tom and I repeatedly stole people’s art on /r/bingus and one of those artists tried to bring us to karma court.

Patrick: This man [below] became the face of /r/Bingus.

Cloakerson: There's this whole confusing saga of moderation changing hands and this insane quadruple cross gaslighting scheme that made the /r/bingus users think that Tom was driven out multiple times and that my account was really hacked or some shit. And then there was the /r/floppa raid.

Dabroman72: We left /r/bingus alone for a while when it became the cat meme subreddit. The first use of mod powers by Tomfootballbrady was used to make a joke document about one of the admins of a popular Bingus-themed Discord server called House of Bingus, and this was the first post by us just wanting to destroy the sub [below].

Q: So when did you notice the Elon death hoax starting to successfully take off and spread? What were some of the earliest signs of success and successful posts?

Patrick: @woomy_2 was one of the first ones to post it en masse. I started doing so right after and people began reposting everything. I think it all started around 10:30 AM est. About an hour later it was trending on Twitter.

Cloakerson: I think I noticed when my posts were getting like 20 or 30 story shares. And then on my story, I just said outright that we needed help [shown below].

Tomfootballbrady: We originally targeted Reddit and it didn't go over too well because all the Tesla and Elon subs were prepared.

Dabroman72: In the discord we first targeted subreddits like r/elonmusk and r/teslamotors but the mods were super quick to respond so we took it to Twitter, where eventually because we were tweeting the hashtag so fast random people from Twitter caught on and it became trending. I think @football tombrady wanted [Patrick] to post it originally? That was definitely a good move.

Patrick: Yeah, 99% sure it was his idea.

Cloakerson: It was him.

Patrick: Eventually 4chan got involved, too. Whoever told me to post it was a genius because we knew other big meme pages would repost it and we got a bunch of massive pages doing so.

Cloakerson: I posted a fake screencap from a supposed "video of his death" and it got like 4,500 likes and people started DMing me asking if I had the video. It's just a GTA V screenshot [shown below].

Dabroman72: Yeah, their meme pages were crucial to helping it blow up. Then other big meme pages continued the joke and posted more memes about it soon after. The next big thing was the Twitter hashtag #RipElon.

Dabroman72: The memes and faked headlines were made in advance by random people on Discord, we had a channel that was just a stockpile of them.

RunThatBall: Yeah, so for the most part the Reddit efforts went well. I think we might have gotten Tom’s post to hot before the mods removed it, but by that point, it was too late. We probably had at least 50 similar posts on just /r/elonmusk. The mods themselves came out and made a statement saying Elon wasn’t dead.

Cloakerson: Ironically, that helped the rumor spread.

RunThatBall: It really took off when people like @spooky.miller and @bigchungles posted about it. I think a lot of that is definitely because of Patrick.

Dabroman72: Yeah, most people who saw it knew it was fake, but those people still talked about it and used the hashtag which caused it to spread more anyway.

Tomfootballbrady: When it bled into Twitter people weren't so quick to find out it was fake.

Q: Were you in any way looking to manipulate the stock market with the #RipElon death hoax?

Dabroman72: Our goal wasn’t to manipulate Tesla stock. A lot of people are adamant that we’re inside traders or trying to short it. Most people involved are high school/college-age kids who just thought it was funny.

Patrick: Yeah, that’s everyone’s big conclusion but it was just for shits and giggles.

RunThatBall: There were a lot of rumors floating around about who caused it. The most popular rumor on r/elonmusk was that we were short-sellers trying to tank the stock value. Some guy on Twitter claimed we were minorities who were upset that we couldn’t buy stock.

Cloakerson: Also, this completely exceeded our expectations. Our win condition was getting him to tweet but I only expected at the very most for it to trend.

RunThatBall: Yeah, our main goal was to get him to tweet but no one actually expected it.

Q: While you weren’t attempting to lower the stock price for personal gain, Tesla's stock did lower considerably for a short period of time when the hoax was going on. Did you expect that to happen when you began the trolling, or do you think it was even related?

Cloakerson: I sort of knew that there would be a minimal impact, people who trade can be reactionary. But from what I've seen and understood, it's been falling considerably already without us. I thought maybe two people would pull at most. But it's kind of worrying seeing publications saying we're short-sellers since we really had zero economic motivation for this.

Dabroman72: Yeah, there was already some sort of correction going on in the stock price beforehand, I can’t tell if we had any temporary impact on it but I don’t think anything major or long term happened to the stock because of the meme that wasn’t already happening.

RunThatBall: Yeah, didn’t his rocket blow up yesterday too? We maybe were like 1/100th of the effect that the rocket had. People hate to see a man secure his bag…

Tomfootballbrady: THEY ARE SO CREATIVE IN MISSING THE MARK. Of all the people that actually believed he died, none of them were Tesla holders.

Q: When Tom contacted me he told me he wanted to make sure 4chan wasn't going to take the credit for this effort. Is that something that's happened before, or is it just something you're noticing happen now?

Cloakerson: I saw a few people from peniswater try and get 4chan in on it and there were some screenshots floating around. From what I can tell there were a few people on there trying to say it was /biz/. I would assume this happens often since it's low-risk, high reward.

Dabroman72: Yeah, this hasn’t happened before specifically to us but there were some 4chan posts about it and a few people on Twitter claiming it was organized by 4chan.

Q: There were a lot of fake headlines going around about Elon’s death. Who made these and what was the reception to them like? Were you seeing the sort of reactions you wanted/expected out of them, and the hoax in general?

Woomy_2: I’m not sure who made it. I expected stuff mostly along the lines of "is this real" and pointing out that it was fake but lots of my followers understood the joke and went along with it.

RunThatBall: We actually had a lot of fake articles. Graphs as well, and even a fake news clip.

Dabroman72: The fake headlines were cooked up by people in the peniswater Discord server. In the server, there are #musk-headline-arsenal and #musk-meme-arsenal channels.

Q: Elon Musk tweeting about the death hoax must have obviously been really exciting; how did it feel seeing all this come to fruition, and what are some of your favorite takes you've seen regarding #ripelon?

Dabroman72: Lots of Musk fans not happy, thought this was very bad to joke about.

Cloakerson: The best part of all this is seeing pseudointellectual "investor" 16-year-olds freak the fuck out over their messiah supposedly dying.

Tomfootballbrady: Watching this come to fruition was just a completely religious experience for me.

Dabroman72: It just got better and better. We went from expecting nothing to it going trending and we were like, “I hope Elon acknowledges it,” and he did. This was the best outcome because it got big enough for Musk to say something but not big enough to cause any serious damage to anything.

u/RemarkableRhombus: It's honestly been pretty crazy to watch. I never expected the event to get this large, and for the most part, I'm glad that it did. I don't worry about any legal repercussions because it wasn't meant to have any effect on the economy. Overall this is the kind of thing we can expect to happen again if the cards are played correctly.

Q: How did you all get together in the first place?

RunThatBall: Tom joined Cloakercord one day and while we were talking in voice chat, Reddit got brought up and he talked to us about his /r/ambien trolling and I honestly didn’t believe him for a moment.

Dabroman72: Basically, the Reddit stuff got connected like this: Patrick, Cloaker, woomy_2y, etc. run meme accounts that me and Tomfootballbrady have been following for years, even before the trolling started. Tombrady creates an Instagram meme account in September 2018. His marketing strategy was to tag Patrick in every one of his posts. Patrick eventually likes and follows, boosting the IG algorithm and promoting his posts. Me and Tombrady start Reddit trolling on /r/showerthoughts and other subreddits around march 2019. It was originally inspired by posts I saw on r/titlegore and I was like, "We should do that but on purpose." The posts blow up in certain comedy subreddits, building the small original peniswater community (we did not personally know Cloaker, woomy_2y, Patrick, etc. at this time, it was just a group of Redditors). Original peniswater members raid r/burgers. Certain shitposts of ours (mainly tombrady's) on /r/ambien blow up on Twitter. He posts the Reddit screenshots on his meme account and they BLOW UP and get thousands of likes, which we had never seen before. Tom gets locked out of the Patrick baiting account and has to start over. We continue documenting the Reddit stuff. Tombrady eventually tells his story to Cloaker, woomy_2y and others, gets their interest, and that’s how we all got connected.

Cloakerson: Cloakercord history goes back four years and I can't even remember all of it. We have our own iceberg [below]. It's months out of date though, there's so much to add. But it's crazy how intertwined we are with internet culture in general and shaping it.

RunThatBall: I don’t like to think about it much because it makes me feel weird but this really is like one of the cultural hubs of the internet.

Cloakerson: Cloakercord is really this weird hidden mecca of untapped irony and memes. Oh, I also helped start the Lego Yoda memes. I took the original Yoda gaming screenshots [shown below].

RunThatBall: It’s weird to think about it because I mean I’m just a 17-year-old kid and none of us can even legally drink but this really is one of the biggest congregations of underground internet influence.

Cloakerson: One of the most jarring moments of my life is being showed my own meme at school.

Woomy_2: We have lots of influence but it's uncredited.

Cloakerson: #RipElon just proved to me that we can do anything we put our minds to.

RunThatBall: It’s so weird man, I used to think about how cool it would be to be friends with like skydoesminecraft when I was nine and going through that Minecraft phase but in a sense, I am living that dream at this point.

u/RemarkableRhombus: I found out about peniswater when Patrick shared an image from TomBradyFootball’s Instagram. I thought it was funny so I followed Tom's page and joined the discord and ended up making a burner account on Reddit that I also began trolling with, which I have found incredibly fun and worth the effort.

Q: So do you guys wish you got more direct credit, or do you prefer to hide in the shadows?

Cloakerson: I sort of wish I had more recognition to my name. But part of the fun is laying low I suppose.

Dabroman72: Yeah, I feel conflicted a bit. Sometimes I want to expand the brand, and other times I think it would be funny if we just did many things like this again in the future until people eventually find out about it themselves.

RunThatBall: Yeah, part of the issue is that if you get too well-known Reddit mods will track you down and you’ll become too well known to bait people.

Cloakerson: I think part of my frustration is I’ve been doing this for five years and I don't even really have anything to call my own in a sense. But that's the nature of the internet.

Q: To cap things off, what is it about trolling you love? Why troll?

RunThatBall: At least in terms of Reddit trolling, it’s really enjoyable to watch their complete lack of self-awareness. As far as other platforms, it’s really just a free form of entertainment if you know how to push someone’s buttons easily. If you get good at it, you can get some really funny reactions.

Woomy_2: A lot of Redditors are just not self-aware at all and take things way too seriously.

Dabroman72: Yeah, it’s really just for our amusement. It’s funny to see how far we can take things. And there have been levels of it, like I started out just posting stupid stuff on /r/showerthoughts and I thought even the concept of posting something stupid there was hilarious. Then that got boring and I started purposely baiting for responses from other Redditors, grouping together with other trolls, starting small raids, and now large raids.

Cloakerson: I think my favorite part is seeing people try so hard to make you feel like you're the stupid one when they're literally just falling for a stupid thing you came up with. It's honestly hard to answer this question just because I haven't really thought about it before. I guess with this Elon thing I realized part of it was to show people not everything has to have this big deep meaning behind it we just did this because it was funny.

RunThatBall: I mean, trolling and irony are so ingrained into internet culture at this point that it’s almost just a state of existence online. It’s so incredibly funny to watch someone not understand what a whooky sack is or watch them lose their minds when you tell them to “go outside and pick up a football.”

Cloakerson: People take themselves way too seriously online and it's nice to deliver a reality check every once and a while.

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