How Elon Musk Uses Internet Slang to Marshal His Army of Online Fans

In 2010, a woman in Sakura, Japan, posted photos of her well-manicured Shiba Inu to her digital journal. The dog, Kabosu, shot her owner a wide-eyed glance, a comic image that quickly jumped from Tumblr to Twitter to Facebook and to the rest of the internet.

A meme legend was born. Someone on Reddit called the dog “DOGE,” a nonsensical nickname that stuck. Another minted a cryptocurrency in DOGE’s name.

Now, 15 years later, in the fast churn of internet culture, DOGE is considered very old. But try telling that to Elon Musk, who has co-opted “DOGE” for the name of his effort to gut the machinery of the federal government — more formally, the Department of Government Efficiency.

It is one of dozens of old-internet ephemera that are baked into his everyday vocabulary. A brief scroll through Mr. Musk’s X feed reveals a menagerie of aging memes and lingo — dad jokes for the very online. They include:

• Frequent references to “420,” a half-century-old slang term for smoking marijuana said to have started in a high school in Northern California. (After smoking what looked like a blunt live on the Joe Rogan podcast, Mr. Musk briefly changed his Twitter bio to “420.”)

• Regularly including the number “69,” a slang term for a sex act that has been around since at least the Kama Sutra. (Mr. Musk, who is 53 years old, is quick to point out that his birthday falls 69 days after 4/20.)

• Calling things that he supports “epic” or “based.” These are adjectives favored by frequent users of Reddit and popularized by fans of Joss Whedon, a director who created the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” television series in the late 1990s and went on to direct two of the Avengers movies. (Mr. Musk has said he wants to create “based” artificial intelligence with his chatbot, Grok, and recently told Tesla investors he expected an “epic” 2026 ahead for the company.)

Mr. Musk’s slang may seem inscrutable to people who aren’t steeped in online culture. But to his fans, Mr. Musk’s dated sensibilities are a kind of internet comfort food — and a nod to a shared, aggrieved worldview.

Mr. Musk’s posts are full of the language of warfare and conquest portrayed in video games. That loaded language is a rallying cry for gamers and others from Mr. Musk’s very online world who — if they have a common political ideology — see in him someone who shares their skepticism of authority and their belief that America has gone too “woke.” To them, Mr. Musk’s online updates about what DOGE is up to come across as far more honest than a press release or news conference or — worst of all — something they read in the mainstream media. (It’s a strategy that recalls Donald Trump’s use of Twitter to signal authenticity during his first administration.)

“We’re living in the revenge of the nerds era,” Hasan Piker, a popular, politically progressive online personality who is not a fan of Mr. Musk, said in an interview. “This is the real, actual revenge of the nerds.”