A few days ago, when the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk seemed imminent, my editors asked me to reach out to Dril, Twitter power user and probably the undisputed jester-king of the platform. There are many loathsome aspects to Twitter, but if there’s one bright spot it’s Dril, so we wanted to hear what he thought about the deal.
For several days I did not hear back. The sale went through and Dril’s feed remained silent. Was our king in mourning for a platform now owned by a man who posts recycled memes posted to iFunny since 2019?
Videos by VICE
Last night Dril got back to me. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, conducted over Twitter DM. His punctuation, spelling, and capitalization has been left intact.
Motherboard: Hi Wint, long time no chat, my name is Rachel Pick and I’m with Motherboard/Waypoint at Vice. We were wondering if we could get a comment from you on Elon Musk’s potential acquisition of Twitter. Let me know if you’re willing to share your thoughts!
Dril: i submit fully to the elon regime. i will laugh at all his jokes from now on and smile kindly upon all of the wonderful gadgets and gizmos he invents. i will never win. Im his pig.
Are you worried at all that Elon will start banning funny people from the platform? Perhaps he feels threatened by your powers?
well hes very smart. i think he will figure out how to put a plug on whatever problems are going on with the site. and if he determines im out of line i will let him destroy me. for the good of his vision
Where will you go after he destroys you?
i imagine i will be forced to post on one of the inferior websites instead. such as 9gag or gmail
Do you think Twitter is worth what it sold for ($44 billion)?
$44 billion is a bargain. imagine every post that has been made, and every post that will be made, is worth $1, and it doesn’t take a math whiz to see the value. Wow
Well shit when you put it that way it makes a lot of sense. Do you have a favorite post of all time? Like if this website was a burning building and you could run in and just save one?
I do not have a favorite post. To be honest most of the posts on this site are terribly foul mouthed. Not for me
At this point, regrettably, I had fallen asleep, as it was very late. But the thoughts he had shared with me were oddly comforting. All internet platforms are owned by billionaires with questionable opinions, and to rail against Twitter’s changing of hands from one billionaire to another is a useless exercise. We are all their pigs, really, whether we like it or not.
And if all else fails, there’s always 9gag.
