A stinging nickname for Twitter owner Elon Musk trended this week on his own social media platform: “space Karen.”
The term — a mashup reference to Musk’s ambitions with rocket company SpaceX and a pejorative label usually used to describe a white woman showing privileged behavior — has been tweeted before. But it was turbocharged Friday and early Saturday after a man reportedly calling himself a “projection activist” cast a series of mocking monikers onto the company’s San Francisco headquarters, with photos and video of his projections going viral.
Countless users soon began employing the “space Karen” taunt in their own tweets. Other insults projected onto the building, meanwhile, included “bankruptcy baby,” “petulant pimple” and “mediocre manchild.”
The hashtags #RIPTwitter, #GoodByeTwitter and #TwitterDown have also trended on the platform this week as users feared the worst following mass resignations at the company and a number of apparently haphazard decisions from the billionaire owner himself, who completed his acquisition of Twitter last month.