Twitter CEO Elon Musk has jokingly rebranded his company “titter” and himself as “Harry Bolz,” in his latest potty-mouthed prank since his takeover of the social media platform.
A photo posted on Twitter last week apparently showed that someone had papered over the ‘w’ on the sign outside the company’s San Francisco headquarters. While some Twitter users assumed the image had been photoshopped, Musk confirmed on Sunday that he had since ordered the letter to be painted over, changing the sign to read “Titter.”
Musk said that as San Francisco law forbade him from removing the letter entirely, he simply had it changed to the same color as the sign’s background. “Problem solved!” he exclaimed.
The world’s second-richest man evidently wasn’t done with the toilet humor, and on Monday Musk changed his Twitter user name to “Harry Bolz,” for no apparent reason save for the obvious innuendo.
Within minutes of the name change, Twitter users noticed that someone had created a “Harry Bolz” cryptocurrency.
Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion last October, and immediately set about rolling back some of the platform’s more odious speech restrictions while cutting its workforce by three quarters in a bid to right its finances. Along the way, the billionaire has injected his own irreverent sense of humor into proceedings, most recently when he announced last month that all inquiries from journalists to Twitter’s press email address would receive a poo emoji as an automated reply.
Musk’s penchant for pranks is apparently turning off advertisers, however. According to a report last week by online news source Semafor, some of America’s top marketing executives are nervous about appearing beside “Harry Bolz” at a trade conference in Miami later this month.
In one email cited by Semafor, McDonald’s chief marketing officer Tariq Hassan accused Musk of “perpetuating racism” by lifting Twitter’s speech restrictions. When Forbes magazine contacted Twitter for comment on Thursday, it received “a poop emoji” in response.