Miles Klee, a 36-year-old writer from Los Angeles, heard from a friend that a memes what he had done in April about vaccinated people enjoying a promiscuous summer had been republished by Mr. Musk. “Someone in my group chat said, ‘LOL, did everyone see how Elon directly stole a meme that Miles made?'”
Mr. Klee is not angry with Mr. Musk, but found the behavior unpleasant. “Of course he has his henchmen who are willing to stand up for what he does,” Klee said, “but for everyone else who’s normal and who’s been on the internet for a long time, it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s crazy moving around. . ‘”
Chas Steinbrugge, 19, a college freshman who runs the @Trigomemetry meme account, is also the creator of Meme Citations, a website that provides the origins of memes in Modern Language Association format.
“Personalities like Elon Musk do not give credit, that hurts the creators,” he said. “You could create a situation where you are promoting young meme creators and contributing to the community by tagging whoever created it or including watermarks.”
Several people to whom Musk has posted his content have requested a payment, be it in dollars, Teslas or Bitcoin. (Mr. Monahan said he was willing to accept “just $ 80,000”).
Mr. Klee took a more novel approach. “Can anyone help me make and sell an NFT of a screenshot of Elon Musk posting a horny vaccine meme I made?” he asked his followers on Twitter. Someone turned the tweet into an NFT, that Mr. Klee was able to sell for $ 1,000 worth of Ethereum, a cryptocurrency.
