The world has watched in horror as Russian troops waged war against Ukraine and its civilians over the past few weeks.
While public figures all over the globe have condemned violence and expressed support for the Ukrainian people’s cause, Elon Musk, a billionaire, has taken a strange tone by sharing memes about war only ten days after expressing support.
While the billionaire has offered tangible support for Ukraine by providing the country with satellite internet through SpaceX’s Starlink satellite system, and tweeting on 4 March, writing: “Hold Strong Ukraine”, he has also been ridiculed for challenging Putin to physical combat and criticised for the memes.
One meme read, “I support the current thing” with a Ukrainian flag edited onto it.
Washington Post journalist David Weigel posted the side by side of two of Musk’s differing tweets and questioned: “What happened in 10 days?”
Weigel also tweeted the following: Write: “I guess the sincere Ukraine position got scanned as cringe so Musk had to reverse-virtue-signal with the NPC meme to recover his based cred.”
Others were also deeply offended by Musk’s distasteful posts. Another meme read: “Netflix waiting for the war to end to make a movie about a black ukraine guy falls in love with a transgender russian soldier.”
Someone took a screengrab of Musk’s tweet, and wrote: “please log tf off forever.”
One person wrote this comment on the pivot “Ukraine went from a foreign policy problem to the culture war issue of the hour, and a lot of people lost their everliving minds.”
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Someone else simply said: “he’s such a loser like how are u a billionaire but still trying to impress losers on twitter.”
Another writer wrote: “When you’re such an edgelord that you end up trolling yourself. @elonmusk is a clown.”
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