Five hours after being hilariously trolled by Elon Musk, Fortnite stepped forward to defend the collective honours of their players.
They had one shot to own the billionaire tech mogul, blasting his salty banter into the outer reaches of space. Tech and gaming nerds eagerly kept one eye on Twitter, breathlessly awaiting their next move.
Finally they responded, with an extremely confident ‘LOL’, suggesting this was the greatest possible burn they could inflict upon a man whose life and business is better documented than any other entrepreneur on the planet.
But their response was, erm, admittedly a little underwhelming…
Taking to Twitter with their gaming fingers well and truly flexed, an unnamed Fortnite social media employee typed:
A whole decade, @elonmusk? Just build, LOL!
This – admittedly rather flat – tweet was accompanied by an embed of an article where Musk boldly claims his intentions to build a human settlement on Mars by the close of the next decade.
According to the Inverse article, Musk, whose lifelong fascination with the red planet is common knowledge, revealed plans to send two unmanned BFR rockets in 2022, with two further unmanned BFRs and two manned BFRs following in 2024.
Each rocket would contain 100 tons of supplies; and would initially provide homes for early settlers. Each voyager would work to extract about one tonne of ice each day; eventually achieving self-sufficiency before returning home with the harvested fuel.
Now, to achieve all this within a mere decade would be mind-blowing, and to suggest this would be too long is not exactly the sickest of burns.
Especially seeing as – correct me if I’m wrong – there isn’t some sort of space race currently going on between Musk and Fortnite, with the co-operative sandbox survival game rallying to stick their flag in Mars’ red dust.
I must confess, their comeback sounded kind of like a balloon being slowly deflated and I honestly expected better.
I was therefore unsurprised when Musk was able to land yet another cheeky blow into a net which had been left wide open for him:
Reality is hard.
Yikes. With three simple words, Musk was able to undermine his opponents’ understanding of reality, while letting them know he views his work as being harder/more important than theirs. Now that’s how you slay a troll.
For those who missed the feud kicking off, Musk shared a screenshot of a satirical article with the headline ‘Elon Musk buys Fornite and deletes it’.
The ‘article’ included a fake quote from himself, proclaiming, ‘I had to save these kids from eternal virginity’.
Musk captioned the tweet, which initially fooled some of his 23 million Twitter followers, with the following explanation:
Had to been done ur welcome.
Of course, this was all done with good humour. Musk himself is a avid supporter of gaming who was simply poking fun at silly stereotypes rather than taking any real digs.
Proud nerd Musk has previously invented ways to play games in Tesla models, and even made his first cool $500 selling the code for a video game he developed at just 12 years old.
I’m sorry Fortnite but I think Musk has won this round…
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Jules studied English Literature with Creative Writing at Lancaster University before earning her masters in International Relations at Leiden University in The Netherlands (Hoi!). She then trained as a journalist through News Associates in Manchester. Jules has previously worked as a mental health blogger, copywriter and freelancer for various publications.