Elon Musk might be a trillionaire, but he’s gotten spectacularly pranked on his own platform.
Elon Musk was hilariously pranked on X today. An X user named David Keyes, whose bio says he’s a “pranker of dictators”, shared a link that asked rural Indians without internet to sign a petition to bring Starlink into India. “Starlink will revolutionize India, particularly rural areas with no internet. So I made a petition just for Indian villagers who currently have NO INTERNET to show how much they want and need Starlink,” Keyes posted.
The petition led users to a website which said “Bring Starlink to India”. “A petition for everyone who currently has no internet,” it said. In order to sign the petition, users had to first click on a checkbox which confirmed that they currently had no internet.
It was clearly a spoof website, highlighting the idea that any Indian who doesn’t have access to the internet in 2026 likely will never be able to afford Starlink’s prices. Also, it was extremely unlikely they’d currently be on the internet and browsing X. But this was clearly lost on Elon Musk, who went ahead and reposted Keyes’ post to his 220 million followers.
It appears that at some point Musk was informed that he’d been pranked, and he deleted his repost. But this wasn’t before it had been screenshot many times, and Musk was roundly mocked on X.
“For a gazillionaire, he’s quite… dim,” wrote an X user.
Keyes himself joined in, sharing an AI-generated image of Indian villagers holding up hand-made Starlink devices and pointing them at the sky. “Indian villagers hoist self-made Starlinks towards sky as rural protests spread in solidarity with Musk,” he posted.
Musk has received a fair amount of criticism in India over his arguments about Starlink being allowed into India. Musk has said that Starlink will be an affordable choice for Indians who currently don’t have internet access, but his arguments have failed basic scrutiny — Indian telecom alternatives are an order of magnitude cheaper than Starlink, and it’s unlikely that anyone who currently doesn’t have internet will be able to afford a Rs. 34,000 upfront fee and Rs. 8,600 monthly fee for Starlink access. And Musk now appears to have made things worse by falling for — and promoting — a website that poked fun at his very arguments.