Muskposting / Elon Tusk

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About

Muskposting refers to humorous variations of the name of entrepreneur Elon Musk, often paired with photoshopped images of objects created using his photographs. Stemming from such variations as "Elongated Muskrat", "Ol' Musky" and "Elon Musket", the trend gained significant traction in February 2019.

Origin

On July 11th, 2014, Twitter user @jdcrowley^[1] tweeted a joke explaining that Elon Musk's full name is "Elongated Muskrat", which gained over 45 likes and 10 retweets over the next five years (shown below).

Spread

The joke didn't receive significant spread until early 2018, when on February 6th Twitter user @Mr_Kapowski^[2] made a similar tweet. The post gained over 44,200 likes and 11,500 retweets within 10 days and prompted further spread of the joke on Twitter and Reddit.

On February 13th, 2018, Redditor^[3] finn_macca posted a fake tweet in which Elon Musk revealed that his full name was Elongated Musket Gun (shown below, right). Later in 2018, memes using the phrase "Elon Musket", paired with an image of a musket gun created with multiple images of Elon Musk's face, gained popularity on Reddit.

Another popular variation of Elon Musk's name, "Ol' Musky", originates from a fake magazine cover posted by the satirical news website The Onion on June 23rd, 2017.^[4]

Starting January 2019, multiple memes utilizing the snowclone "What are you laughing at? / My brain:", paired with images of various objects made using photographs of Elon Musk, were posted on /r/memes and /r/dankmemes subreddits (examples shown below). One popular post, made by Reddit^[5] user CannedWolfMeat, gained over 66,900 upvotes in two days.

Elon Tusk

On February 25th, 2019, Elon Musk tweeted^[6] one version of the meme. The tweet gained over 50,000 retweets and 398,000 likes in four days.

On February 27th, Elon Musk briefly changed his Twitter handle to "Elon Tusk 🐘"^[7] and "Elon Tusk"^[8], supposedly as a nod to the Muskposting trend and/or a namesake variation originally created by Redditor reapingsulls123^[9] on February 20th.

Rick and Morty Cameo

On November 24th, 2019, Elon Musk made a cameo as Elon Tusk in the episode three "One Crew Over the Crewcoo's Morty" of season four of Rick and Morty.^[10]