Have you seen a tweet from Grimes making fun of her former partner, Elon Musk, for saying that wealthy ex-wives are destroying Western civilization? The Grimes tweet is fake. The musician didn’t actually poke fun at Musk over the comment. The Musk tweet, on the other hand, is completely real.
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“’Super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse’ should filed be listed among ‘Reasons that Western Civilization died,’” the billionaire SpaceX CEO tweeted on Wednesday.
Musk’s very real tweet was a response to a user on X who was criticizing MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, over the kinds of organizations to which she donates her money. Scott has given away at least $16 billion since her divorce. But the groups she’s giving to are apparently too woke, in this particular person’s opinion.
A very real tweet from billionaire Elon Musk sent on March 6, 2024.
Screenshot: X
And that’s when Musk, a billionaire who’s been married three times, chimed in to give his two cents about how wealthy ex-wives are somehow destroying civilization. Musk didn’t elaborate on how that could be possible, but we digress. All of this is the background necessary to understand the fake Grimes tweet that’s currently going viral.
“Is the ex-wife destroying Western Civilization in the room with us right now?” the snarky fake tweet from Grimes reads.
Musk is the father of at least two children with Grimes, who is often used as a foil in photoshopped jokes about the billionaire. But this one isn’t a real tweet from the musician.
The fake tweet from Grimes (top) over a very real tweet from Elon Musk.Screenshot: X
Who created this fake tweet to make it look like it was sent by Grimes? That appears to be an X account with the name Trap Queen Enthusiast and the handle @marionumber4. Gizmodo confirmed with the creator they indeed conjured this joke into existence on Wednesday, and it seems to be taking on a life of its own, as memes have been known to do.
You can even find the fake tweet on Bluesky, a competitor to X, where people there also believe it’s real.
“Better men have deleted their accounts and retired from the internet after burns half as severe as that,” one Bluesky user said late Wednesday.
And just in case you didn’t think the chain of custody on this fake tweet wasn’t complex enough, another fake screenshot of the Grimes tweet has been created to make it look like a Community Note has been added.
“While she did bear multiple of Elon’s children, Grimes was never technically married to Elon. Elon’s only real ex-wife is merely kinda rich,” the fake Community Note reads.
Yet another fake tweet purporting to show a Community Note on a Grimes tweet. The Musk tweet is the only thing that’s real in this image.
Screenshot: X
And that’s how these things spread. A joke that most people within a small online circle fully understand as a joke will break containment, spreading across the internet and even jumping to other social media sites. And then people are left to wonder whether it’s real or not—be it Mike Lindell supposedly driving drunk or an adorable croissant in the shape of a dinosaur.
Checking the official Grimes X account won’t answer the mystery either, as it’s not there and anyone who’s asked can only respond that maybe she deleted it. Well, we’re here to tell you this one is fake because we confirmed it with the creator. But, again, we can’t stress enough that Musk’s bizarre tweet about ex-wives destroying Western civilization is very real. He really is just a very strange dude.