Elon Musk's "Occupy Mars" Tweet

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Part of a series on Elon Musk. [View Related Entries]

About

Elon Musk "Occupy Mars" Tweet refers to the online reaction to an image posted by Tesla-founder Elon Musk. Following a post that featured the words "Occupy Mars" and an image of a blood moon, people responded to Musk's tweet by noting that the image was of the moon, not Mars.

Origin

On January 22nd, 2019, Twitter ^[1] user @dodiewill2 tweeted at Elon Musk an "Occupy Mars" image from the website TeeRepublic^[2] and the caption, "I really don't want to completely lose my faith in humanity, but some of the things I've been seeing lately are so disgusting that it turns my stomach. @elonmusk can you make that trip to Mars happen sooner. Hire me and I'll even work for free to speed up the process" (shirt and tweet shown below, left and right, respectively).

Several months later, on June 23rd, Elon Musk tweeted^[3] the image with no caption. The post received more than 138,000 likes, 16,000 retweets and 3,700 comments in 24 hours (shown below).

Spread

Following the post, people responded to the tweet by attempting to correct Musk, pointing out that that was a photograph of a blood moon.^[4] Twitter user @flcnhvy tweeted,^[5] "That's the moon." The post received more than 7,500 like and 280 likes in 24 hours (shown below, left).

Twitter user @upulie tweeted, "Hey Super Space Genius, that’s the moon in a total lunar eclipse." Within 24 hours, the tweet received more than 37,000 likes and 6,300 retweets (shown below, center).

Musk responded to the @flcnhvy tweet^[6] with two Rolling on the Floor Laughing Emoji and the comment "Moon too" (shown below, right).

Twitter user @BBW_BFF tweeted^[7] the original @dodiewill2 tweet, writing "ppl are claiming that this is a joke referencing Trump's recent moon/Mars tweet, but if so, why wouldn't Musk use an image of the moon…that looked more recognizably like the moon? also, this logo was around pre-Trump's tweet. I just think homedude wasn't paying attention" (shown below).

Several media outlets covered the tweet, including Fox,^[8] CNET,^[9] Business Insider,^[10] Uproxx^[11] and more.