Twitter Celebrity Dril, Who Isn’t Leaving The Service Anytime Soon, Says Elon Musk Stole One Of His Tweets

Twitter has its upsides and downsides. Among the former is the one known as @dril, a mysterious figure who, since 2008, has been the unofficial king of “weird Twitter.” What will happen to him when/if the social media service he calls home goes down? In a rare, predictably hilarious interview, conducted by The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, Dril declares he’s “not planning on leaving Twitter anytime soon,” partly because the other social media apps, like Mastodon and Hive, are “unusable basically.”

So for now, Dril remains on Twitter dot com, even if he doesn’t appear to be much of a fan of its chaotic, unfunny new owner, Elon Musk. For one thing, they have a past. Back in 2020, Musk effectively stole a post from him: a tweet, from 2013, about a “skeleton war” that Musk screengrabbed, cropped, then added a picture of three angry, sword-wielding skeletons. “Sounds right,” Musk wrote.

“He posted the tweet verbatim and cropped my name completely out of it,” Dril told Lorenz. “His girlfriend Grimes, she condones this sort of behavior. He’s stealing my posts and not even paying me.” Dril also claimed that Musk’s new, dicey policy about effectively shadow-banning “negative” posts, had already affected him. “He’s threatening to demonetize me when he’s already capitalizing on my content, and I’m not getting a cent.”

He elaborated:

“Say a Tesla ran into my son and killed him,” he said, referring to one of Musk’s other businesses. “Maybe I think that it’s fine, it’s not negative that a Tesla ran into my son and killed him. That’s fine, because it’s a work in progress.” Musk cannot know if a Tesla running over his son was actually very positive, Dril explained, and so it should not be ranked as a negative tweet.

Still, Dril is sort of enjoying the mess Musk has caused. “Everything he does is a comedic bit,” he explained. “He’s always trying to get a laugh, that’s why he makes all his cars suicidal. Just watching everything burn, it’s entertaining, that’s for sure.”

The interview also found Dril doing his absurdist shtick, in interview form. At one point he joked (or not!) that he’d be willing to work at Twitter if Musk offered him a job. “I think it would be my duty to answer the call,” Dril said. “I would absolutely do it. I would be his dog, I would follow his every order like a disgusting dog. I would beg for his mercy and I would learn to code if it pleased him.”

You can read the full interview over at The Washington Post. In the meantime, some Dril fan went above and beyond and catalogued his entire, 14-year output.