Ice Cube has clapped back at Elon Musk after he shared a meme mocking the NWA rapper. In response, Ice Cube took the opportunity to criticise the perceived downfall of Twitter since the billionaire purchased the company.
It all began on 14 September when the Tesla CEO, 52, shared an old meme of the rapper to X, formerly known as Twitter. The meme showed a picture of Ice Cube next to a half-full glass of water. The text above the meme read: “Remember Ice Cube? This is him now, feel old yet?”
Musk shared the image after replying with a crying-laughing emoji to another user’s earlier post of the same meme. While the “Feel Old Yet?” meme has circulated on the internet since 2014, the Boyz n The Hood star didn’t take the joke lightly, and fired back at Musk with his own meme.
“Remember Twitter? This is it now, feel stupid yet?” Ice Cube captioned his own image set, which included side-by-side photos of Twitter’s old bird logo on the left, and a picture of a dumpster fire on the right.
While the SpaceX founder’s post reached 86.4m views and Ice Cube’s only 26.4m views, it didn’t take long for fans to applaud Ice Cube for his response to Musk.
Music producer Questlove replied with a comic book-style GIF that simply read: “Booyah.”
“This is epic,” another user wrote back.
“Ice Cube 1, Musk 0,” said someone else.
In October last year, Musk purchased Twitter for $44bn. Since then, there’s been a handful of changes to the platform, including its rebrand from Twitter to X. A number of new features were introduced as well, such as the taking away of legacy verified accounts in favour of its new Twitter Blue subscription service.
The company has also laid off around 80 per cent of staff - bringing the employee count down to around 1,500. Musk previously referred to the thousands of employees who were fired or quit as part of a Twitter organisation that was “absurdly over-staffed,” and said running the company was as simple as a glorified “group text”.
Now, Musk’s X has agreed to attempt to settle a lawsuit by former employees who say the company cheated them of severance pay following the mass layoffs.
The billionaire tech entrepreneur’s personal life has been of much focus lately, after a new biography by author Walter Isaacson, titled Elon Musk, was released this week. In the book, Isaacson described Musk’s relationship with ex-girlfriend Amber Heard.
According to the biography, when Musk told the Aquaman star she reminded him of a character from the video game Overwatch, she commissioned a costume of the character named Mercy. On 13 September, Musk then posted a photo of Heard dressed in cosplay as the video game character.
In the book, Heard described her relationship with the X owner as “brutal”. However, she added that she still loves Musk “very much,” explaining: “Elon loves fire, and sometimes it burns him.”
