Tuesday, 5th November 2024

Elon Musk hires meme-creator to handle Tesla’s social media

Billionaire businessman Elon Musk has hired meme-creator Adam Koszary to be the social media manager for his Electric Vehicle (EV) company

Wednesday, 22nd May 2019

Billionaire businessman Elon Musk has hired meme-creator Adam Koszary to be the social media manager for his Electric Vehicle (EV) company, Tesla.

Koszary, the programme manager for the The Museum of English Rural Life, run by the University of Reading, will join Tesla in July.

The museum's twitter account, @TheMerl went viral last April when Koszary, who was trawling the archive looking for an image to mark International Unicorn Day, posted an old archived picture of a large sheep with unusual horns and captioned it -- "Look at this absolute unit".

In the social networking lingo, the term "absolute unit" stands for anything over-sized and the picture of the large sheep went viral online overnight.

The tweet has now been retweeted more than 31,000 times and has over 1,11,000 likes, the report said.

At the time, the viral meme prompted Elon Musk not only to change his Twitter profile picture to that of this sheep, but also to change his bio to read "Absolute Unit". He also added the museum's page to the 84 accounts he follows.

In response, MERL used Elon Musk's picture as its own profile image.

The job means Koszary will be leaving the heritage sector, he added in a follow up tweet, "but, I need to be able to afford a house at some point," he said.

MIT's Technology Review account added to the accolades, asking Musk, who hadn't tweeted in more than 48 hours on Tuesday, if they could get a referral bonus.

It's not clear what Koszary's role at the automaker will be.

In recent weeks, however, Tesla's official Twitter account has been more active than usual. It's also been tweeting more candidly and humorously, following in step with many companies who have turned to strange jokes to up their social media game.

"The end-game for our whole Twitter," Koszary told, "is engaging people with English rural life, even if that means memes."