The Onion is an American digital media company and newspaper organization that publishes satirical articles on international, national, and local news. The company is based in Chicago but originated as a weekly print publication on August 29, 1988, in Madison, Wisconsin. The Onion began publishing online in early 1996. In 2007, they began publishing satirical news audio and video online as the Onion News Network. In 2013, The Onion ceased publishing its print edition and launched Onion Labs, an advertising agency.
Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman and investor. He is the founder, chairman, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, product architect, and former chairman of Tesla, Inc.; owner, chairman, and CTO of X Corp.; founder of the Boring Company and xAI; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation. He is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$232 billion as of December 2023, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $210.2 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX.
Talulah Jane Riley-Milburn is an English actress. She has appeared in films, including Pride & Prejudice (2005), St Trinian's (2007) and its sequel St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009), The Boat That Rocked (2009), and Inception (2010). She has also appeared on the HBO science fiction western series Westworld (2016–2018) and the FX biographical miniseries Pistol (2022).
Gary Gensler is an American government official and former Goldman Sachs investment banker serving as the chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Gensler previously led the Biden–Harris transition's Federal Reserve, Banking, and Securities Regulators agency review team. Prior to his appointment, he was professor of Practice of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Harambe was a western lowland gorilla who lived at the Cincinnati Zoo. On May 28, 2016, a three-year-old boy visiting the zoo climbed under a fence into an outdoor gorilla enclosure where he was violently grabbed and dragged by Harambe. Fearing for the boy's life, a zoo worker shot and killed Harambe. The incident was recorded on video and received broad international coverage and commentary, including controversy over the choice to use lethal force. A number of primatologists and conservationists wrote later that the zoo had no other choice under the circumstances, and that it highlighted the danger of zoo animals near humans and the need for better standards of care.
X, formerly and colloquially known as Twitter, is a social media website based in the United States. With over 500 million users, it is one of the world's largest social networks. Users can share and post text messages, images, and videos known historically as "tweets". X also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists and communities, and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature. Although the service is now called X, the primary domain name 'twitter.com' remains in place as of February 2024, with the 'x.com' URL redirecting to that address.
Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, who decided to create a payment system as a "joke", making fun of the wild speculation in cryptocurrencies at the time. It is considered both the first "meme coin", and more specifically the first "dog coin". Despite its satirical nature, some consider it a legitimate investment prospect. Dogecoin features the face of the Shiba Inu dog from the "doge" meme as its logo and namesake. It was introduced on December 6, 2013, and quickly developed its own online community, reaching a peak market capitalization of over US$85 billion on May 5, 2021. As of 2021, it is the sleeve sponsor of Watford Football Club.
ClickHole is a satirical website that parodies clickbait websites such as BuzzFeed and Upworthy. It was launched on June 12, 2014, in conjunction with The Onion's decision to stop its print edition and shift its focus exclusively to the internet. According to ClickHole's senior editor, Jermaine Affonso, the website is "The Onion's response to click-bait content" and serves as "a parody of online media". Critics noted that, on a deeper level, ClickHole illustrates the shallow nature of social media content and media sites' desperation to share such content.
The Babylon Bee is a conservative Christian news satire website that publishes satirical articles on topics including religion, politics, current events, and public figures. It has been referred to as a Christian or conservative version of The Onion.
The Tesla Roadster is an upcoming battery electric four-seater sports car to be built by Tesla, Inc. The company has said that it will be capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds. The Roadster is the successor to Tesla's first production car, the 2008 Roadster.
The Hard Times is a satirical website with a focus on punk, alt music, and millennial culture founded in 2014 by former SF Weekly music editor Matt Saincome, his brother Ed Saincome, and comedian Bill Conway. It has been compared to The Onion, ClickHole, and Reductress in style, and has received praise for its specificity and niche appeal.
Matt Saincome is an American businessperson, journalist, and satirist.
Elon Musk is the CEO or owner of multiple companies including Tesla, SpaceX, and X Corp, has expressed many views on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from politics to science.
Meme Man, sometimes also referred to as Mr. Succ or the Stonks guy, is a character often featured in internet memes. He is depicted as a 3D render of a smooth, bald, and often disembodied blue-eyed male head. He was popularized in the mid-2010s by the artist "Special meme fresh", and became a common character in many surreal memes, a genre of internet humor inspired by surrealism. During the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, Meme Man was popularized by users of the subreddit r/wallstreetbets as the face of the "stonks" meme.
Sriram Krishnan is an Indian-American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. He is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Business magnate Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of American social media company Twitter, Inc. on April 14, 2022, and concluded it on October 27, 2022. Musk had begun buying shares of the company in January 2022, becoming its largest shareholder by April with a 9.1 percent ownership stake. Twitter invited Musk to join its board of directors, an offer he initially accepted before declining. On April 14, Musk made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company, to which Twitter's board responded with a "poison pill" strategy to resist a hostile takeover before unanimously accepting Musk's buyout offer of $44 billion on April 25. Musk stated that he planned to introduce new features to the platform, make its algorithms open-source, combat spambot accounts, and promote free speech.
Thud was a satirical media company founded by Ben Berkley, Cole Bolton, and Elon Musk in 2017. The company launched satirical websites and products. After Musk pulled his funding, the company went defunct in May 2019.
Rahul Ligma is a fictional fired Twitter employee, a character played by one of a pair of amateur improvisational actors that pranked multiple major media outlets on October 28, 2022. Ligma, the fictional character's surname, is a reference to the Ligma joke. The spontaneous and intentionally transparent hoax was revealed the same day, after the initial news coverage triggered debate among real Twitter employees about whether or not expected mass layoffs had already started. The Rahul Ligma character next appeared in early November as a recently unemployed FTX employee in the Bahamas. On November 15, Elon Musk, the incoming CEO of Twitter, facetiously offered Ligma and his compatriot their (fictional) old jobs back, and posted a photograph taken with them at Twitter headquarters. Although at least one journalist had publicly apologized for their failure to fact check before reporting the news, several notable media outlets were still oblivious to the running joke, and reported the duo's firing and rehiring as actual news. In social media, the follow-up stunt was widely criticized for lack of sensitivity to actual Twitter employees who had lost their jobs. On November 23, news reports surfaced once again, this time reporting that the actor playing Daniel Johnson had in fact been hired by Twitter for the first time.
Junlper is an American former shitposter on Twitter. She is known for posting satirical screenshots of fabricated news stories and is credited with popularizing the term 'goblin mode' and creating a viral fake headline about the "dick vein" being removed from Snickers candy bars.
