The “Elon Musk buying X” isn’t a new development in the long-running saga of Musk and his memes. In this case, the whole Elon Musk Deletes Fortnite thing dates all the way back to 2018 when Fortnite was at the peak of popularity and that’s when Musk jokingly claimed that he had purchased the Battle Royale game and then deleted it. The tweet included an image that appears to be an edited screenshot of a MarketWatch article.
Fortnite’s official Twitter account responded by poking fun at the fact that it take a decade for Musk’s SpaceX to build its first base on Mars. To this, Musk replied, “Reality is hard.”
Alright, that was all the way back in 2018 but it’s things like this that resurface and perpetuate the rumor cycle. Fast forward a year later and everything seems to have come back full circle.
At the end of Chapter 1 Season 11, a black hole opened up and seemingly swallowed everything, leaving a blank screen and lots of unanswered questions. Even the official Fortnite Twitter fell silent after changing everything to the black hole.
Time passed and everyone was getting antsy. It was all fun and games until someone decided to joke around and said that Elon Musk is going to buy Fortnite and he’s going to delete it. In the middle of a long downtime and speculation rising, the seemingly off-hand comment quickly went viral and everyone lost their collective minds.
Tweets like the one Musk made in 2018 resurfaced and everything was talking about it. Of course, things settled down when Chapter 2 premiered and people had something else to talk about.
And that brings us to this year, 2022.
In the earlier part of the year, the Fortnite community expressed a rising concern regarding the game’s future. Players were anxious about the release of Chapter 3 Season 2, which was scheduled to release in a few weeks.
To sum things up, Chapter 3 Season 1 was plagued with technical issues. Using Unreal Engine 5, Epic Games added new mechanics in the form of tornadoes, sliding, and web-shooters to Fortnite. But these new features came at the cost of the game’s stability, leading to game-breaking glitches and many, many minor bugs.
During this time, rumors about Elon Musk buying Fortnite began bubbling up again. Apparently, someone (or someones) was trying to revive the meme. And in a span of 24 hours last month, there were more than 50,000 people searching for “is elon musk going to buy fortnite?” People started digging up the exchange from 2018 and that got everyone talking again.
The rumors spread like wildfire throughout the community as people expressed their concern over the rumors.
But why did such an obvious joke gain so much momentum?
It’s probably because Elon Musk has a knack for acquiring businesses and growing them in ways the original owners didn’t know were possible. But it’s more likely that the original from 2018 managed to surface yet again, causing more confusion. This is Elon Musk we’re talking about, he is just as likely to follow through with a seemingly offhand comment.
But like many rumors, it was proven to be false.
Everything went back to normal. Elon Musk had no intention of buying Fortnite and deleting it. It’s funny how something as harmless as a joke could cause such an uproar with so many within a community. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt, dear reader, especially when someone “claims” Elon Musk is deleting Fortnite.
And maybe wait for Epic Games to make an official statement for something this Earth-shaking. It could save you from having to explain yourself.
Check out this video from tmnglv, explaining the most recent instance of the joke resurfacing.