Business
How Elon Musk Uses Internet Slang to Marshal His Army of Online Fans
In 2010, a woman in Sakura, Japan, posted photos of her well-manicured Shiba Inu to her digital journal. The dog, Kabosu, shot her owner a wide-eyed glance, a comic image that quickly jumped from Tumblr to Twitter to Facebook and to the rest of the internet.
A meme legend was born. Someone on Reddit called the dog “DOGE,” a nonsensical nickname that stuck. Another minted a cryptocurrency in DOGE’s name.
Now, 15 years later, in the fast churn of internet culture, DOGE is considered very old. But try telling that to Elon Musk, who has co-opted “DOGE” for the name of his effort to gut the machinery of the federal government — more formally, the Department of Government Efficiency.
It is one of dozens of old-internet ephemera that are baked into his everyday vocabulary. A brief scroll through Mr. Musk’s X feed reveals a menagerie of aging memes and lingo — dad jokes for the very online. They include:
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Frequent references to “420,” a half-century-old slang term for smoking marijuana said to have started in a high school in Northern California. (After smoking what looked like a blunt live on the Joe Rogan podcast, Mr. Musk briefly changed his Twitter bio to “420.”)
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Regularly including the number “69,” a slang term for a sex act that has been around since at least the Kama Sutra. (Mr. Musk, who is 53 years old, is quick to point out that his birthday falls 69 days after 4/20.)
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Calling things that he supports “epic” or “based.” These are adjectives favored by frequent users of Reddit and popularized by fans of Joss Whedon, a director who created the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” television series in the late 1990s and went on to direct two of the Avengers movies. (Mr. Musk has said he wants to create “based” artificial intelligence with his chatbot, Grok, and recently told Tesla investors he expected an “epic” 2026 ahead for the company.)
Mr. Musk’s slang may seem inscrutable to people who aren’t steeped in online culture. But to his fans, Mr. Musk’s dated sensibilities are a kind of internet comfort food — and a nod to a shared, aggrieved worldview.
Mr. Musk’s posts are full of the language of warfare and conquest portrayed in video games. That loaded language is a rallying cry for gamers and others from Mr. Musk’s very online world who — if they have a common political ideology — see in him someone who shares their skepticism of authority and their belief that America has gone too “woke.” To them, Mr. Musk’s online updates about what DOGE is up to come across as far more honest than a press release or news conference or — worst of all — something they read in the mainstream media. (It’s a strategy that recalls Donald Trump’s use of Twitter to signal authenticity during his first administration.)
“We’re living in the revenge of the nerds era,” Hasan Piker, a popular, politically progressive online personality who is not a fan of Mr. Musk, said in an interview. “This is the real, actual revenge of the nerds.”
Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Every photo of Mr. Musk wielding a chain saw while wearing “deal with it” sunglasses indoors (another meme) represents a triumph of the nerd culture he has long identified with. On Wednesday, he attended the first meeting of President Trump’s new cabinet wearing a T-shirt that said “Tech Support.”
His fans speak back to him in his language. They send suggestions on how DOGE can fix the government by dismantling entire sections of it, often coded in the language of images typically found on Reddit. (Wojak, a crudely drawn character popularized on the message board 4chan, is a perennial favorite.)
Mr. Musk prods his more than 200 million X followers for help with decisions in online polls. And he listens. The conversation becomes a feedback loop of insider jokes for the billionaire, who once hosted “Saturday Night Live” and prides himself on his sense of humor. (Mr. Musk sometimes overestimates his popularity in the comedy world. Once he joined the comedian Dave Chappelle on a stage in San Francisco. He was booed.)
“Anyone can find their own community, even if it’s a community frozen in 2010,” Brian Feldman, an internet culture writer who has long followed Mr. Musk’s exploits, said in an interview.
But to those steeped in modern internet culture, Mr. Musk’s communication style is far from on trend. That is especially so when even current terms like “no cap” (translation: no lie) or “lowkey fell off” (waned in popularity or relevance) are already showing their age. As with recent questions about Mr. Musk’s claims of superior video game skills, they see cracks in his supernerd facade.
“More than people would like to admit, they often become trapped in the internet they first encounter,” Mr. Feldman said.
Last week, Mr. Musk appeared at a conservative political conference wearing dark sunglasses, a big gold chain and a T-shirt that said he was “not procrastinating” but instead working on “side quests” (a common practice in sprawling role-playing games). He played off the quote from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita that Robert Oppenheimer said was going through his mind as he tested the first atomic bomb: Now, I am become Death. The destroyer of worlds.
“I am become meme,” Mr. Musk said to a mostly mute crowd. “There’s living the dream and there’s living the meme, and that’s pretty much what’s happening.”
Even some of his most fervent followers on X recoiled. “Elon Musk fell off lowkey,” one user wrote.
Mr. Musk’s online vocabulary is a reminder of 2010, when nerd culture was ascendant. Reddit was a meme factory for favorites like Lolcats and icanhazcheeseburger. Gamers gathered in web forums or on online role playing games to hang out and fight through digital dungeons.
This was also the beginning of Mr. Musk’s metamorphosis from mere billionaire to internet celebrity. That year, he appeared as himself in the second “Iron Man” film. His online fans ate it up.
All of this also coincided with the rise of Web 2.0, a more social version of the internet. Twitter — long before Mr. Musk bought it and renamed it — was a town square. Facebook moved beyond likes and status updates with “Groups,” a feature that allowed people to form their own smaller communities. The chat forum 4chan was full of anonymous, often angry online trolls who bonded over vulgar behavior.
While online groups had existed for years, the newer social networks were more tightly knit and rewarded the behavior that Mr. Musk often displays today. The right kind of posts could pick up steam and shoot across the internet.
Provocateurs moved beyond small-scale trolling to aggressive mass movements, such as Gamergate, a targeted harassment campaign against a female game designer by video game players who claimed she represented a lack of ethics in games journalism. It morphed into a social movement that fought diversity, feminism and what gamers saw as overly progressive values in film, television, literature and the video game industry — a viewpoint that Mr. Musk shares.
Gamergate also signaled that digital demonstrations could, for better or worse, lead to real-world change.
Mr. Musk’s tweeting style changed from anodyne company updates to more overt trolling. In 2018, he tweeted that he had secured a buyout offer for Tesla for a stock price of $420. Once, when a competing car company tried undercutting him on price, Mr. Musk said that he would drop the cost of his Tesla Model X to $69,420.
“The gauntlet has been thrown down!” he proclaimed on Twitter. “The prophecy has been fulfilled.”
Unlike other tech billionaires, who seemed to live lives far removed from regular internet folk and became less online the richer they got, Mr. Musk was making himself relatable with memes, absurdity and relentless posting. And parts of the online world embraced him.
“Many people find him off-putting, I think,” said coldhealing, a pseudonymous cultural commentator who regularly follows Mr. Musk and other social movements online, in an interview. “But there are many people who he resonates with, and even though I think it’s 10 percent of the population max, it’s an influential 10 percent.”
Mr. Musk’s online life became even more bombastic after the Covid pandemic began in 2020. He attacked Tesla short-sellers and California state officials who wouldn’t let him reopen a Tesla factory. In 2023, he even live-tweeted photos of himself driving to Mark Zuckerberg’s house, threatening to wrestle the chief executive of Facebook. (They were, at the time, in the throes of organizing a real fighting match between them. It never happened.)
He posted himself playing Elden Ring, Path of Exile and other video games like Diablo IV. One of the world’s wealthiest men was telling gamers that he was one of them.
Mark Kern, a former video game executive at Blizzard, wrote in a post to X last week that people should not mess with gamers. “We’re forged by endless boss battles against impossible odds. We do not give up. We do not stop. We are the terminators of the culture war.”
“Yes,” Mr. Musk wrote, quoting the post.
Conservatives who don’t spend a lot of time online have also embraced the image of Mr. Musk taking a chain saw to what they see as a bloated federal government, even if many of them aren’t exactly sure what he’s trying to say or when they’re supposed to laugh.
“It’s validation from people who have no idea what he’s saying, but still think he’s speaking this expert language,” said Mr. Feldman, the internet culture writer.
But Mr. Musk may be finding his online limits. It was difficult for some of his followers to shake off last week’s stage appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which reminded them that it is hard to stay cool when you are, in fact, not very young. (Kabosu did not live to see the meme she inspired enter American political life. The 18-year-old Shiba Inu died last year.)
“Anyone else feel the vibe-shift in tpot/tech?” one X user wrote, referring to an online community called “This Part of Twitter,” which is largely composed of tech workers who have historically warmed to Mr. Musk. In other words, Mr. Musk was starting to look a little out of touch and increasingly unpopular.
Nonetheless, Mr. Musk seems to be doubling down. His posting to X has increased in recent weeks, some days numbering in the hundreds. And he is still being validated by his fans.
On Thursday, Mr. Musk posted another meme to his X account — one of dozens of posts he had made that morning. In it was a photo of Mel Gibson as Mad Max in “The Road Warrior,” the early-1980s action thriller about a shotgun-toting nomad navigating a postapocalyptic world. In bold lettering, the meme said: “Ladies, it’s time to start thinking whether the guy you’re dating has postapocalyptic warlord potential.” (Film buffs may note that Max’s wife and son were killed by a biker gang in the first “Mad Max” film.)
One follower replied with a photo of a man wearing a Trojan helmet and body armor with an assault rifle in one hand and a spear in the other. It was one of more than 7,000 replies.
“Yup,” the follower said, adding a fire emoji.
Chatty bots are sharing their hot takes through hundreds of thousands of AI-generated podcasts. And the invasion has just begun.
Though their banter can be a bit banal, the AI podcasters’ confidence and research are now arguably better than most people’s.
“We’ve just begun to cross the threshold of voice AI being pretty much indistinguishable from human,” said Alan Cowen, chief executive of Hume AI, a startup specializing in voice technology. “We’re seeing creators use it in all kinds of ways.”
AI can make podcasts sound better and cost less, industry insiders say, but the growing swarm of new competitors entering an already crowded market is disrupting the industry.
Some podcasters are pushing back, requesting restrictions. Others are already cloning their voices and handing over their podcasts to AI bots.
Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast “Diary of a CEO.” On YouTube, his clone narrates “100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett,” which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett’s cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.
Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast called “The Newsworthy,” let an AI voice fill in for her earlier this year after she lost her voice from laryngitis and her backup host bailed out.
She fed her script into a text-to-speech model and selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs to speak for her.
“I still recorded the show with my very hoarse voice, but then put the AI voice over that, telling the audience from the very beginning, I’m sick,” Mandy said.
Mandy had previously used ElevenLabs for its voice isolation feature, which uses AI to remove ambient noise from interviews.
Her chatbot host elicited mixed responses from listeners. Some asked if she was OK. One fan said she should never do it again. Most weren’t sure what to think.
“A lot of people were like, ‘That was weird,’” Mandy said.
In podcasting, many listeners feel strong bonds to hosts they listen to regularly. The slow encroachment of AI voices for one-off episodes, canned ad reads, sentence replacement in postproduction or translation into multiple languages has sparked anger as well as curiosity from both creators and consumers of the content.
Augmenting or replacing host reads with AI is perceived by many as a breach of trust and as trivializing the human connection listeners have with hosts, said Megan Lazovick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company.
Jason Saldanha of PRX, a podcast network that represents human creators such as Ezra Klein, said the tsunami of AI podcasts won’t attract premium ad rates.
“Adding more podcasts in a tyranny of choice environment is not great,” he said. “I’m not interested in devaluing premium.”
Still, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify have introduced features for creators to clone their voice and translate their content into multiple languages to increase reach and revenue. A new generation of voice cloning companies, many with operations in California, offers better emotion, tone, pacing and overall voice quality.
Hume AI, which is based in New York but has a big research team in California, raised $50 million last year and has tens of thousands of creators using its software to generate audiobooks, podcasts, films, voice-overs for videos and dialogue generation in video games.
“We focus our platform on being able to edit content so that you can take in postproduction an existing podcast and regenerate a sentence in the same voice, with the same prosody or emotional intonation using instant cloning,” said company CEO Cowen.
Some are using the tech to carpet-bomb the market with content.
Los Angeles podcasting studio Inception Point AI has produced its 200,000 podcast episodes, accounting for 1% of all podcasts published on the internet, according to CEO Jeanine Wright.
The podcasts are so cheap to make that they can focus on tiny topics, like local weather, small sports teams, gardening and other niche subjects.
Instead of a studio searching for a specific “hit” podcast idea, it takes just $1 to produce an episode so that they can be profitable with just 25 people listening.
“That means most of the stuff that we make, we have really an unlimited amount of experimentation and creative freedom for what we want to do,” Wright said.
One of its popular synthetic hosts is Vivian Steele, an AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue. “I am indeed AI-powered — which means I’ve got receipts older than your grandmother’s jewelry box, and a memory sharper than a stiletto heel on marble. No forgetting, no forgiving, and definitely no filter,” the AI discloses itself at the start of the podcast.
“We’ve kind of molded her more towards what the audience wants,” said Katie Brown, chief content officer at Inception Point, who helps design the personalities of the AI podcasters.
Inception Point has built a roster of more than 100 AI personalities whose characteristics, voices and likenesses are crafted for podcast audiences. Its AI hosts include Clare Delish, a cooking guidance expert, and garden enthusiast Nigel Thistledown.
The technology also makes it easy to get podcasts up quickly. Inception has found some success with flash biographies posted promptly in connection to people in the news. It uses AI software to spot a trending personality and create two episodes, complete with promo art and a trailer.
When Charlie Kirk was shot, its AI immediately created two shows called “Charlie Kirk Death” and “Charlie Kirk Manhunt” as a part of the biography series.
“We were able to create all of that content, each with different angles, pulling from different news sources, and we were able to get that content up within an hour,” Wright said.
Speed is key when it comes to breaking news, so its AI podcasts reached the top of some charts.
“Our content was coming up, really dominating the list of what people were searching for,” she said.
Across Apple and Spotify, Inception Point podcasts have now garnered 400,000 subscribers.
Los Angeles County is suing four oil and gas companies for allegedly failing to plug idle oil wells in the large Inglewood Oil Field near Baldwin Hills.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court charges Sentinel Peak Resources California, Freeport-McMoran Oil & Gas, Plains Resources and Chevron U.S.A. with failing to properly clean up at least 227 idle and exhausted wells in the oil field. The wells “continue to leak toxic pollutants into the air, land, and water and present unacceptable dangers to human health, safety, and the environment,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit aims to force the operators to address dangers posed by the unplugged wells. More than a million people live within five miles of the Inglewood oil field.
“We are making it clear to these oil companies that Los Angeles County is done waiting and that we remain unwavering in our commitment to protect residents from the harmful impacts of oil drilling,” said Supervisor Holly Mitchell, whose district includes the oil field, in a statement. “Plugging idle oil and gas wells — so they no longer emit toxins into communities that have been on the front lines of environmental injustice for generations — is not only the right thing to do, it’s the law.”
Sentinel is the oil field’s current operator, while Freeport-McMoran Oil & Gas, Plains Resources and Chevron U.S.A. were past operators. Energy companies often temporarily stop pumping from a well and leave it idle waiting for market conditions to improve.
In a statement, a representative for Sentinel Peak said the company is aware of the lawsuit and that the “claims are entirely without merit.”
“This suit appears to be an attempt to generate sensationalized publicity rather than adjudicate a legitimate legal matter,” general counsel Erin Gleaton said in an email. “We have full confidence in our position, supported by the facts and our record of regulatory compliance.”
Chevron said it does not comment on pending legal matters. The others did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
State regulations define “idle wells” as wells that have not produced oil or natural gas for 24 consecutive months, and “exhausted wells” as those that yield an average daily production of two barrels of oil or less. California is home to thousands of such wells, according to the California Department of Conservation.
Idle and exhausted wells can continue to emit hazardous air pollutants such as benzene, as well as a methane, a planet-warming greenhouse gas. Unplugged wells can also leak oil, benzene, chloride, heavy metals and arsenic into groundwater.
Plugging idle and exhausted wells includes removing surface valves and piping, pumping large amounts of cement down the hole and reclaiming the surrounding ground. The process can be expensive, averaging an estimated $923,200 per well in Los Angeles County, according to the California Geologic Energy Management Division, which notes that the costs could fall to taxpayers if the defendants do not take action. This 2023 estimate from CalGEM is about three times higher than other parts of the state due to the complexity of sealing wells and remediating the surface in densely populated urban areas.
The suit seeks a court order requiring the wells to be properly plugged, as well as abatement for the harms caused by their pollution. It seeks civil penalties of up to $2,500 per day for each well that is in violation of the law.
Residents living near oil fields have long reported adverse health impacts such as respiratory, reproductive and cardiovascular issues. In Los Angeles, many of these risks disproportionately affect low-income communities and communities of color.
“The goal of this lawsuit is to force these oil companies to clean up their mess and stop business practices that disproportionately impact people of color living near these oil wells,” County Counsel Dawyn Harrison said in a statement. “My office is determined to achieve environmental justice for communities impacted by these oil wells and to prevent taxpayers from being stuck with a huge cleanup bill.”
The lawsuit is part of L.A. County’s larger effort to phase out oil drilling, including a high-profile ordinance that sought to ban new oil wells and even require existing ones to stop production within 20 years. Oil companies successfully challenged it and it was blocked in 2024.
Rita Kampalath, the county’s chief sustainability officer, said the county remains “dedicated to moving toward a fossil fuel-free L.A. County.”
“This lawsuit demonstrates the County’s commitment to realizing our sustainability goals by addressing the impacts of the fossil fuel industry on front line communities and the environment,” Kampalath said.
Business
Instacart is charging different prices to different customers in a dangerous AI experiment, report says
The grocery delivery service Instacart is using artificial intelligence to experiment with prices and charge some shoppers more than others for the same items, a new study found.
The study from nonprofits Groundwork Collaborative and Consumer Reports followed more than 400 shoppers in four cities and found that Instacart sometimes offered as many as five different sales prices for the exact same item, at the same store and on the same day.
The average difference between the highest price and lowest price on the same item was 13%, but some participants in the study saw prices that were 23% higher than those offered to other shoppers.
The varying prices are unfair to consumers and exacerbate a grocery affordability crisis that regular Americans are already struggling to cope with, said Lindsey Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative.
“In my own view, Instacart should close the lab,” Owens said. “American grocery shoppers aren’t guinea pigs, and they should be able to expect a fair price when they’re shopping.”
The study found that an individual shopper on Instacart could theoretically spend as much as $1,200 more on groceries in one year if they had to deal with the kind of price differences observed in the pricing experiments.
At a Safeway supermarket in Washington, D.C., a dozen Lucerne eggs sold for $3.99, $4.28, $4.59, $4.69, and $4.79 on Instacart, depending on the shopper, the study showed.
At a Safeway in Seattle, a box of 10 Clif Chocolate Chip Energy bars sold for $19.43, $19.99, and $21.99 on Instacart.
Instacart likely began experimenting with prices in 2022, when the platform acquired the artificial intelligence company Eversight. Instacart now advertises Eversight’s pricing software to its retail partners, claiming that the price experimentation is negligible to consumers but could increase store revenue by up to 3%.
“These limited, short-term, and randomized tests help retail partners learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable,” an Instacart spokesperson said in a statement to The Times. “The tests are never based on personal or behavioral characteristics.”
Instacart said the price changes are not the result of dynamic pricing, like that used for airline tickets and ride-hailing, because the prices never change in real time.
But the Groundwork Collaborative study found that nearly three-quarters of grocery items bought at the same time and from the same store had varying price tags.
The artificial intelligence software helps Instacart and grocers “determine exactly how much you’re willing to pay, adding up to a lot more profits for them and a much higher annual grocery bill for you,” Owens said.
The study focused on 437 shoppers in-store and online in North Canton, Ohio; Saint Paul, Minn.; Washington, D.C., and Seattle.
Instacart shares were down more than 5% in midday trading on Wednesday and have risen 1% this year.
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