Elon Musk Changes Twitter Avatar to Picture of Fork in the Road, And Now the Internet Is Having a Panic Attack (Another One)

Elon Musk is at it again, and the internet is taking the bait. This time it didn’t even take the eccentric billionaire a single word to stoke his audience into a frenzy. After changing his Twitter avatar to a stock photo of a fork in the road, Tweets started pouring in from across the internet as people attempted to guess what this alteration could possibly signify.

The mischievous mogul has a long history of toying with the internet. His market-moving Tweets, which have both tanked and ballooned stock prices, are arguably more infamous than either his electric car or spaceship company. Having such a massive influence on market culture is clearly something the man relishes and takes full advantage of to plot his business moves. This latest gambit is yet another example of Musk’s superpower of suggestion, and predictably, it’s causing some serious rumblings.

Rumour has it that just weeks before the mysterious avatar swap, Musk paid a visit to Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, to get “some advice” on important next steps. A month later, Tesla purchased $1.5 billion in Bitcoin and announced it would be accepting the cryptocurrency as payment. Immediately the price of Bitcoin shot up to a record high of $43,000, before peaking even higher. Then this:

Now the internet is having a full-blown panic attack wondering what the South African sage is predicting next. Could it be a fork in the road between Earth and Mars? A choice between life and death? Or just the decision of whether or not to have toast with your morning eggs? (Um, just say no to carbs.) While no one but Musk can be absolutely certain, recent posts focusing on cryptocurrency are prompting many in the peanut gallery to warn of a Bitcoin “hard fork”.

Hard forking in blockchain lingo, means splitting the network into two branches, where one follows the previously written protocol and the other forked branch operates from a new set of rules. As many are pointing out, an open-source blockchain developer out of Switzerland called Cardano is preparing a hard fork on March 1.

We have no idea what the hell any of this means, but we love watching the internet squirm at the hands of a playboy nerd genius whose favorite musical artist is Weird Al Yankovic. Whatever the new avatar symbolizes, we’re 100 percent positive Elon Musk is having a great time ‘forking’ with us.

Cover Photo: Pool (Getty Images)

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