Elon Musk’s life is immersed in technology. His accomplishments include co-founding PayPal and being the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and he can’t seem to stop tweeting no matter how much trouble it gets him in. But for some reason, Musk appears to not fully grasp one of the most important aspects of the internet: The meme.
Musk put out a call for the “dankest memes” from his Twitter followers on Thursday.
Send me ur dankest memes!!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 25, 2018
He also clarified his request in a follow-up tweet: “Not moths tho.”
Loyal responders did certainly deliver memes. Some, unsurprisingly, were Musk related.
https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1055708515715543040
https://twitter.com/richeeeeee/status/1055641353638408193
— chris neal (@chrisneal_11) October 26, 2018
But many were not.
https://twitter.com/bukka__/status/1055708352603279360
https://twitter.com/Iam_Obscure/status/1055709643530371072
https://twitter.com/EnesUstundag/status/1055705475281494016
There were also the usual political (sometimes offensive) memes in the mix of responses, which you’ll be spared from here.
Musk even threw in a meme of his own.
My twitter feed rn pic.twitter.com/48Ay7CxR56
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 25, 2018
And that’s all fine and good—except that the existence of this thread indicates Musk and many of his followers don’t understand what a dank meme is in the first place.
First of all, there’s nothing less dank than a “how do you do, fellow kids?” moment. But more importantly, dank memes, by definition, aren’t appealing to a mass audience.
Know Your Meme says the dank meme is an “ironic expression used to describe online viral media and in-jokes that are intentionally bizarre or have exhausted their comedic value to the point of being trite or cliché.” That certainly rules out the most popular Musk memes, which are straightforward jokes.
Sure, you could argue Musk really did want a thread full of the most bizarre memes—if he hadn’t also tweeted “I said dankest not darkest omg.” The nature of dank memes, seeped in satire and absurdism as they are, is to be dark.
I said dankest not darkest omg
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2018
A celebrity asking for and sharing dank memes is an oxymoron. The fact that Musk is gathering the memes voids the dankness of any meme posted therein. But that’s OK, because more dank memes will come—just not in his thread.
As Miles Klee once wrote for the Daily Dot: “When everything is dank, then nothing is, and the universe of memes is constantly expanding, mutating, re-emerging from its own ashes.”
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