About

Elon Musk and Grimes Couple Photo Parodies is a series of mock comparisons to a photograph of Elon Musk and Grimes together at the 2018 Met Gala.

Origin

On May 7th, 2018, the New York Post’s Page Six^[1] reported that Tesla-CEO Elon Musk was supposedly dating electronic musician Grimes. According to the site, the pair met after Musk was doing research to make a joke on Twitter only to see that Grimes had made the same joke three years prior. It was rumored that the two would attend the 2018 Met Gala that evening, which they later did (image below).

Spread

That night, people on Twitter began posting images of pop culture figures and compared them to images of Musk and Grimes, commenting mostly on their age difference, as well as Grimes' gothic aesthetic in comparison to Musk's. The earliest version of this was posted by Twitter^[2] user @freebasecatnip, who tweeted an image of Bruce Willis and Mila Jovovich in the 1997 science fiction action film The Fifth Element. They captioned the post "ELON MUSK AND GRIMES BE LIKE 'ᵐ ᵘ L ᵗᶦᵖᵃˢˢ'."The post (shown below, left) received more than 4,600 retweets and 21,000 likes in 48 hours.

Shortly after, Twitter^[3] user @pajamashaw tweeted an image of Jason Schwartzman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead from the film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. They captioned the post (shown below, center) "Elon Musk and Grimes make their debut at the Met Gala." The post received more than 23,000 retweets and 95,000 likes in two days.

Throughout the evening, people continued to post mismatched couple pictures and compared them to Elon Musk and Grimes (example below, right).

Several media outlets covered the comparisons, including Mashable, ^[4] Vice, ^[5] Memebase,^[6] Inverse^[7] and more.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References