Elon Musk Took Jab at Disney’s Bob Iger With Apparent April Fools’ Joke

• Elon Musk took aim at Disney CEO Bob Iger in an apparent April Fools’ Day joke posted to X.
• “Excited to join @Disney as their Chief DEI Officer,” Musk wrote in the early hours of April 1.
• Musk’s post seemed to be recycled from one published just seven minutes earlier by someone else.

Elon Musk took aim at Disney CEO Bob Iger in an apparent April Fools’ Day joke which, it turns out, wasn’t that original.

“Excited to join @Disney as their Chief DEI Officer,” Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

“Can’t wait to work with Bob Iger & Kathleen Kennedy to make their content MORE woke! Even the linguini,” he added to the post, which at the time of writing had accumulated more than 110,000 likes.

The Tesla owner’s comment was posted in the early hours of April 1 in what appeared to be an attempt to be one of the first to prank the internet for April Fools’ Day.

However, Musk’s post appears to have been recycled from one published just minutes earlier by a podcaster and author named Konstantin Kisin.

Seven minutes before Musk made the comment, at 12:37 PT, Kisin had published a near-identical post.

“As of today, I am resigning from TRIGGERnometry. The opportunity to join the BBC as Chief Diversity Officer is an opportunity I simply couldn’t turn down,’ Kisin wrote.

Musk replied to Kisin’s joke with a single crying-with-laughter emoji before reworking it to mention Iger, whom he has beefing with ever since Disney pulled advertisements from X.

The X boss trashed Iger back in December 2023 after Disney pulled ads from the platform in the wake of Musk’s controversial decision to support an antisemitic post.

In a series of posts, Musk wrote that Iger should be “fired immediately” and that Walt Disney himself was “turning in his grave over what Bob has done to his company.”

Iger’s decision to pull ads followed not just Musk’s actions but also a report from the nonprofit Media Matters that showed that their ads were being placed next to white supremacist and antisemitic content. Musk has since filed a defamation lawsuit about the report.

Speaking at NYT’s DealBook Summit in November, the month before Musk went off at him, Iger civilly addressed the fallout.

“We know Elon is larger than life in many respects, and that his name is very much tied to the companies he either has founded or he owns, whether it’s Tesla or SpaceX or now X,” Iger said.

Though he did add that he has respect for Musk, he continued: “By him taking the position that he took in quite a public manner, we just felt that the association with that position and Elon Musk and X was not necessarily a positive one for us.”

More recently, Musk has backed others beefing with Iger. In February, the billionaire said he would fund Gina Carano’s lawsuit against The Walt Disney Company and Lucasfilm.

The MMA fighter turned “Star Wars” actor, who was fired from the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian” in February 2021, filed a suit against the companies in California alleging harassment and bullying as a result of sharing her conservative political beliefs on X and other social media platforms.

Musk’s X Corporation is paying for her lawsuit. The billionaire appeared to confirm his involvement by reposting Carano’s announcement on X and writing: “Please let us know if you would like to join the lawsuit against Disney.”

Disney’s leadership is facing a pivotal week with investors on Wednesday voting on a boardroom shake-up.

Last week, the company was accused by America First Legal (AFL) of misleading shareholders by promoting a “woke political and social agenda.”

“Disney has displayed an inexplicable disregard for its customers and shareholders, forcing radical gender-expansive, anti-White, and anti-police content on families while providing warnings about harmful content on uncontroversial content,” the group said in a press release.

Disney did not immediately reply to a request by Business Insider for comment.