Elon Musk’s 9 Unfunniest Jokes of 2023

Musk’s first months as CEO at Twitter were marked by chaotic mass layoffs, and, unlike some executives, he did not feign sympathy for those affected. Instead, he appeared to relish his role as corporate grim reaper, even illegally firing an employee who tweeted in protest of his mandatory return-to-office policy and using an Office Space clip to publicly mock a disabled project manager who was trying to confirm his employment status after being locked out of his computer. Musk estimated in April that he’d cut about 80 percent of staff, a figure that Tucker Carlson found incredible when interviewing him that same month.

“If you’re not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization,” Musk told Carlson, with a glint in his eye, “and you don’t care that much about censorship, then you can really let go of a lot of people, it turns out.” Carlson did his best to sell this smugness-as-deadpan-wit by acting as if he could not help bursting into laughter. Shortly afterward, he was axed himself at Fox News, while gutted Twitter teams proved unable to stem a rising tide of bots, extremist hate speech, and misinformation. Epic ownage, you guys. 

Harboring the utter contempt for the media befitting a billionaire, Musk in March decided to cut off the direct line of contact between journalists and Twitter, announcing that all emails sent to their address for press inquiries would go unanswered forevermore. (Not that there was necessarily anyone left to read them, anyway.) As if worried that a mere lack of response would not communicate his supreme indifference to reporters’ questions, Musk had an auto-reply set up to bounce a poop emoji back to whoever reached out to the company.  

While the gag may not have reached its ideal audience — six-year-olds who watch YouTube on iPads — it struck many who did see the post as a fitting omen for the future of the platform under Musk, and even some consternation among his believers. “Seriously can you just shut up and focus on Tesla again,” one groused. Also, free tip here: a silly little prank tends to be more effective if you don’t give the entire world a heads-up about it. 

This one was classic Elon: identify what you see as an uproarious irony and harp on it endlessly in the vain hope that people will remark upon your cleverness. In this case, Musk was at war with the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish nonprofit, for supposedly fomenting an advertiser boycott of Twitter by (correctly) observing that it had become a swamp of unchecked antisemitism and other hate speech. When not amplifying antisemitic content himself, Musk hit upon a notion that must have struck him as absolutely brilliant: What if he sued the Anti-Defamation League for… defamation? And got the organization to remove the prefix “anti-” from their name? Wouldn’t that be just too perfect? Get it? Hello? 

Well, he certainly beat that dead horse a while. In a far greater irony, while the ADL paused its own ad spending on X/Twitter amid this feud, it resumed advertising there in October, and has stuck around even as Musk doubled down on antisemitic conspiracy theories, leading many big brands (including Disney and Apple) to abandon ship. Now it’s just one of a greatly diminished number of revenue sources for Musk’s financially beleaguered website. Maybe that’s why he never followed through on the lawsuit?  

Truly, who knows what Musk thought he was getting at here. This April incident was set in motion after he decided to have National Public Radio’s account falsely labeled as “state-affiliated media,” a term the platform had long used for accounts that share propaganda from authoritarian governments (and, after that, “government-funded media,” though it’s a private nonprofit that receives less than one percent of its budget through federal funding). NPR promptly quit the site in response, becoming the first major news organization to do so, and its main account bio now reads, “You can find us every other place you read the news.” Musk, undaunted by the reality of NPR’s finances, issued a call to “defund” them.

But it got even dumber. The following month, Musk got into a testy email exchange with an NPR reporter Bobby Allyn that began with him asking, “So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?” He claimed it was policy to recycle dormant user handles, no matter the original owner. When Allyn asked who might given control of the account, Musk replied, “National Pumpkin Radio,” along with “a fire emoji and a laughing emoji,” per Allyn’s article on the correspondence. Even for a troll as lazy and uncreative as Elon, this was pretty weak sauce, as was his petulant followup message to Allyn: “You suck.”

The centerpiece of the interview Elon gave in an April appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher was the so-called “woke mind virus,” which both men agreed was bad and scary. (Musk’s example of it was the unfounded assertion that the only thing students are taught about George Washington these days is that he owned slaves.) Maher didn’t really bother to challenge Musk on any of his nonsense except to point out that colonizing Mars is a stupid idea and we don’t need to be wildly reproducing (as Musk has argued) when natural resources are in decline.  

Watching Musk fumble through his answers is always unpleasant, but one moment in this segment shone through as the cringiest. Around the 4:30-minute mark, Maher says that Musk “deals the cards” of historical change through innovations in tech. Musk smirks and hunches like he can’t wait to say what’s just popped into his head, and barely gets the words out without giggling. “I deal some memes, too,” he mumbles before breaking into a great guffaw. It’s not clear what this had to do with anything, nor why his self-appointed status as memelord — despite a habit of poaching content from the rest of the internet — should inspire such mirth. Like lots of Musk’s humor, it signaled his desire to deliver a punchline despite never having one.

As Meta rolled out Threads, a direct Twitter competitor with a very similar interface, Musk got himself into a flamewar with the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. At the height of the feud, the two said they were willing to fight a “cage match,” partly inspired by headlines about Zuckerberg’s martial arts training. Of course, we should’ve known better than to get our hopes up: despite floating big plans for the showdown, Musk essentially canceled with an excuse about needing surgery for back and neck issues — which, as far as anyone knows, he still hasn’t received. (What is this country coming to when the richest man alive can’t obtain timely medical care?)

Anyway, what we saw instead of kicks and punches and headlocks were schoolyard taunts from Musk, who called Zuck a “cuck” — hey, at least it rhymes — and proposed “a literal dick measuring contest,” an event ideal for any venue scheduled to be burned to the ground immediately afterward. In the midst of this high-level discourse, his weirdest recurring bit had to do with a controversial viral clip of the Dalai Lama kissing a young boy and telling him “suck my tongue.” Because Threads had courted the Buddhist leader in an effort to add prominent figures to the platform, Musk combined the incident with his jeers at Zuckerberg, posting “Zuck my tongue” and, later on, “Zuck my [tongue emoji],” and referred to his rival with this baffling coinage a third time when boasting that he could handily win in the fight he then postponed indefinitely. Somehow, it didn’t get funnier the more he used it.   

Speaking of Wikipedia: Musk has an axe to grind with that institution as well, viewing it as “overly controlled by mainstream media” and biased by “left wing editorial” influences. We can take that to mean he abhors the existence of free, publicly available record of his every scandal and failure in business. To the rest of the online world, Wikipedia is an invaluable common good — something close to the promise of the internet as described decades ago — so Musk also dislikes that it’s financed by charitable donations, and got fact-checked by his own Community Notes feature when he falsely claimed the nonprofit doesn’t need these donations.

Unable to gain the moral high ground on an encyclopedia, Musk resorted to his one true strength: enormous wealth. Half an hour after trying to persuade people not to support the Wikimedia Foundation, he shifted tactics and extended a mocking offer of $1 billion to change the site’s name to “Dickipedia.” (For a full year, he clarified.) “In the interests of accuracy,” he added, as if worried his messaging had been too subtle, or hadn’t racked up enough engagement. Another slam dunk, sir.

This year, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, rolled out a ChatGPT competitor called Grok, which has been integrated into X/Twitter for Premium+ users — those powerful elites paying $16 a month to use the platform. Any practical applications of the chat bot are evidently beside the point; Musk mostly advertises it as an amusement, since you can prompt it to be vulgar or write in the blustery voice of an overstimulated redditor. This makes it a suitable companion for Elon, who has hinted that he “guided” the large language model to be “based” and “love sarcasm,” just like him! Nothing could make more sense than Musk finally outsourcing his comedy writing to an AI designed to emulate his charmless affect.

What’s genuinely hilarious about Grok, however, is everything that’s gone wrong with it. For one, it copied ChatGPT answers and directed users to OpenAI, the company behind that bot. Then there was the disappointment of right-wingers who hoped that Grok, with Musk’s input, might align better with their ideology than previous bots — but realized that it refused to produce the transphobic and racist comments they wanted, favored Biden over Trump in a 2024 election rematch, spoke to the value of diversity and inclusion, and proved willing to criticize Musk himself. Responding to the uproar from conservative blue-checks, Musk promised “immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral,” though not before we experienced a late contender for funniest sentence of the year: “Grok is woke unfortunately.”

Guess it goes to show that in a roundabout way, Musk can make you chuckle after all. He’s just never done it on purpose.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge when Musk was compelled to troll this very publication, in response to an article by this correspondent, about his mismanagement of Twitter. First there was some throat-clearing as he decided how best to disparage a magazine whose cover he graced in recent memory. “Wait, Rolling [stone emoji] is still alive?” he tweeted. “It’s not a real publication anymore, just a source for Wikipedia citations.” Ouch. I guess we can’t all be the fake news rags where you get your right-wing conspiracy theories.

He wasn’t satisfied yet, however. Shortly after replying with a laugh-crying emoji to a tweet in which a supporter called us “Rolled stone” — if you can explain what that’s even supposed to mean, we’re all ears — Musk saw another acolyte quip, “Not much of a stone anymore. More like a pebble.” Now he had the elements of his masterstroke. “Rolled Pebble,” Musk replied, proving for the umpteenth time that his idea of originality consists of repeating and recombining stuff he heard from other people. The purportedly insulting nickname did not catch on among Rolling Stone haters, and we have not heard it since.