No Joke! X Runs PETA Ad With Clownish Elon

For Immediate Release:
December 20, 2023

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

X marks the spot … for PETA’s anti–animal testing Elon Musk ad! With big brands, including Disney and Apple, having ditched X (formerly Twitter) and despite Musk’s message to fleeing advertisers to “go f*** yourself,” PETA offered to step up and cover some of his lost revenue with an advertisement of its own—which X just approved to run. The image shows Musk in clown face with the message, “While Elon clowns around … monkeys and pigs die painfully in his labs. No joke.”

PETA is referencing animal experiments conducted by Musk’s company Neuralink, which drills into the skulls of monkeys and pigs to implant brain chips. Between 2018 and 2022, the company killed approximately 1,500 animals for its experiments, including more than 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys—with Musk stating that some monkeys’ deaths were due to using animals who weren’t very healthy to begin with.

“Elon Musk’s reckless, gruesome animal experiments are a circus, not science,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA wants Musk to stop clowning around and find it in his heart, if he has one, to leave animals out of his games and focus instead on human-relevant research.”

Out of 23 monkeys known to have been strapped into chairs and used in the brain-computer implant experiments at the University of California–Davis between 2017 and 2020, at least 15 died. Experimenters screwed steel posts into the skulls of macaque monkeys, failed to provide them with adequate veterinary care, and used an unapproved substance called “BioGlue,” which killed monkeys by destroying portions of their brains. Monkeys also endured facial trauma, seizures, and recurrent infections at implantation sites.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.