By Staff Writer Ben Pfeffer
Elon Musk does whatever he wants to. He has done good things like spread the popularity of electric cars, create a couple hyperloops to improve travel, is the CEO of SpaceX, and created and improved solar panels. However, as you know, he has called a professional diver a pedophile, smoked weed on a podcast, created a legal flamethrower, and joked about taking Tesla private.
This time, Musk has taken a not good or bad route. He has tweeted a funny, somewhat cringy, false news article with the headline, “Elon Musk buys Fortnite and deletes it,” and the caption, “’I had to save these kids from eternal virginity’ – Elon Musk.” Musk captioned the article, “Had to been done ur welcome.” The tweet has received 1.2 million likes and 400,000 retweets.
This is nothing shocking for Musk, since he has a twitter problem like the president, but the shocking part is that Fortnite responded to this tweet and they argued with him. They said, “A whole decade, @elonmusk? Just build, LOL!” using a ‘just build’ joke in the Fortnite community referring to Musk’s prediction of when he thinks SpaceX will build its first base on Mars. Musk replied to this argument with the short, but very true statement that “Reality is hard.”
Musk also got a joking response from a professional Fortnite gamer on the eSports team TSM who goes by the online name Myth.
Myth responded to Musk with the statement, “Excuse me Mr. Musk but I think it’s important for me to state that I actually lost my virginity after playing Fortnite. just sayin >_>.” Then Musk, being a connoisseur of trash talk, responded with another short and snappy statement. He replied, “Online doesn’t count.”
Musk won both of those twitter exchanges, who will be next? Musk hasn’t always talked trash about Fortnite and its players. Musk has always been friendly with the community before this.
In the past, Elon Musk has communicated with online Fortnite personalities. He has offered to get a popular streamer, Tfue, better internet. Elon even asked for the professional’s input on games to add to Tesla.
The exchange went between Tfue(T) and Musk(M):
T: Yo @elonmusk could you help me get better internet thanks <3
M: Yes
T: I’m gonna buy a @Tesla now because you replied
M: What are some of the most fun games we could have on a Tesla? Classic Atari is just the start.
T: Fortnite is by far the most fun game right now but any of the classics on Atari or Nintendo 64 would be incredible
This exchange and Elon’s personality in general leads many to rightly believe that his tweet was a joke, but many are also taking it seriously and either getting offended or thinking that he is actually deleting the game.
One example of how those offended people respond is from @tankcarder. Tank says, “Lol..wrong, I have talked to a lot of parents that have daughters and they say Fortnite is the ONLY video game their daughter will play and that their daughter didn’t even play or have interest in Video games until Fortnite came out.” Don’t be like Tank.
Most of twitter jokingly thanked Musk for his ‘heroic’ actions. In general, this tweet lead to an all-out meme war between the members of the reply section, including Fortnite.
This light-hearted post by Elon is very helpful and necessary in a time like this with bombs being mailed and journalists being killed. Everyone should be able to take this post with a grain of salt and laugh a little.
Musk continues to do what he does best and run his businesses in the background making new advances every day.
He just may throw in a joke every now and then, and we need to be ready for it.
PHOTO COURTESY: FORTNITE HUB YOUTUBE