In January 2021 the GameStop short squeeze exploded as Reddit’s WallStreetBets army of retail “apes” coordinated a massive buy-up of GME shares, sending the heavily shorted stock soaring more than 1,700 percent and inflicting billions in losses on hedge funds that had bet it would collapse. On February 4, right in the middle of that chaos, Elon Musk posted the now-legendary tweet “I am become meme, Destroyer of shorts”—a tongue-in-cheek rewrite of Oppenheimer’s nuclear-test line from the Bhagavad Gita. Musk, who had already spent years publicly mocking short sellers targeting Tesla, was throwing his considerable meme energy behind the retail rebellion, framing himself as the living embodiment of internet culture that could vaporize Wall Street’s short positions. The tweet instantly became lore: part victory cry, part self-mythologizing, and the moment many marked as Elon fully stepping into his role as the internet’s chief meme warlord during the greatest retail-versus-hedge-fund battle of the decade.