About

Elon Musk Life Hacks, also known as What Do You Think, Elon Musk, is a series of Russian-language memes that showcase simple, DIY or humorous inventions designed to parody the work of Tesla-founder Elon Musk.

Origin

On October 31st, 2017, Twitter ^[1] user @StalinGulag tweeted an image of the particle accelerator at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk. They captioned the tweet, "Ну и как ты на это ответишь, Илон Маск?! Опять захлебнешься завистью к научным достижениям нашей страны!" (translation: "Well, how do you answer this, Ilon Mask ?! Again you will choke with envy at the scientific achievements of our country!") The post (shown below) received more than 580 retweets and 1,000 likes in less than one year.

Spread

On January 26th, 2018, just ahead of the launch of SpaceX on February 6th, the Russian website PeopleTalk^[2] published a list of image macros featuring faux inventions with the caption that translates to "What do you think of this, Elon Musk" (examples below, left).

Following the launch, more memes of this sort were posted on Twitter. On February 7th, Twitter^[3] user posted an image of man with a DeLorean car and the caption, "What do you think, Elon Musk?" The post (shown below, center) received more than 100 retweets and 900 likes in six months.

On August 20th, 2018, Twitter^[4] @andromedamn spread the memes to English-speaking audiences. That day, they posted a series of memes with the caption, "apparently russia has this meme where they @ elon musk in pictures of super stupid bootleggy lifehacky "inventions" captioned "and how do you like this, elon musk?" so as it turns out, no one is better at memes than the russians." The post (shown below, right) received more than 23,000 retweets and 73,000 likes in three days. \

Several media outlets have covered the meme, including Memepedia,^[5] Vice, ^[6] Mashable ^[7] and more.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References