Rahul Ligma And Daniel Johnson

2022hoax / prankclassic

Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson are the gag names two pranksters used on October 28, 2022, when they posed as laid-off Twitter data engineers outside the company's San Francisco headquarters after Elon Musk's takeover. CNBC and Bloomberg interviewed them on camera and published the story before catching the crude ligma joke baked into the fake surname.

prank memeshoax memeselon musk memesdouble entendre memes2022 memes

Overview

Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson are the fake names used by two men who tricked business reporters into thinking they were data engineers just fired from Twitter on the day Elon Musk closed his acquisition of the company1. The pair walked up to a scrum of camera crews outside Twitter's San Francisco headquarters holding cardboard boxes stacked with desk clutter, gave sober-sounding quotes about six years of service and a Tesla payment they could no longer make, then walked off before anyone checked an employee directory2.

The last name Ligma is a long-running online setup joke that reads aloud as "lick my," with the payoff usually landing on testicles3. CNBC's Deirdre Bosa published quotes from the pair inside a same-day story about the Musk deal, and Bloomberg ran a similar piece, before both outlets pulled the interview material once the reference clicked3. The stunt became one of the defining images of the chaotic first hours of Musk-era Twitter and is still cited whenever a reporter gets caught chasing a doorstep source without verification4.

How It Spread

Between about 3 p.m. and 4:36 p.m. EST that same afternoon, Bosa posted follow-up tweets walking the story back, first noting that "some questions being raised about whether these are really twitter employees" and admitting corporate communications was not returning calls4. The Verge broke the debunk publicly after searching the Twitter email system and finding no matching accounts, a detail then picked up by the Daily Mail and other outlets that afternoon2. CNBC updated its article at 8:11 p.m. EST to strip out the interview portion, adding an editor's note that it could not confirm the identities of the two men1. Bloomberg issued its own correction after initially running with the story3.

On Twitter, mockery landed harder than the original scoop. Reporter Gene Park's line that "tech reporters are absolutely being trolled and they don't know what ligma is" pulled in thousands of likes, and @greg16676935420's summary that Rahul Ligma "was just some random dude with a box that got CNBC with a Ligma Nuts joke" hit more than 190,000 likes in three days4. A clip of the Johnson interview shared by @greg_price11 racked up 4.1 million views and 36,000 likes in the same window4. Coverage of the fooling itself ran in the Daily Mail, New York Post, Mashable, and Economic Times India within hours235.

The capstone came from Musk himself. That evening he quote-tweeted a straight-faced write-up of the prank with "Ligma Johnson had it coming," a post that pulled 659,000 likes and 63,000 retweets in three days4. On November 15, 2022, Musk posted a photo of Ligma, Johnson, and himself standing together inside Twitter's San Francisco office, framing it as a welcome visit for the two pranksters; the image cleared 279,000 likes within roughly two hours4.

How to Use This Meme

The joke works as a template for any moment when a professional gatekeeper (a reporter, a bouncer, a customer service rep) takes an obviously fake name at face value. Posters typically drop "Ligma Johnson had it coming" as a reaction to a bungled news story, or edit a screenshot of the two men with a box into any layoff or firing headline4. The core mechanic is the same as the original ligma setup: name a fake person whose surname forces the mark to say the punchline out loud.

Frequently Asked Questions

Rahul Ligma And Daniel Johnson

2022hoax / prankclassic

Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson are the gag names two pranksters used on October 28, 2022, when they posed as laid-off Twitter data engineers outside the company's San Francisco headquarters after Elon Musk's takeover. CNBC and Bloomberg interviewed them on camera and published the story before catching the crude ligma joke baked into the fake surname.

prank memes hoax memes elon musk memes double entendre memes 2022 memes

Overview

Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson are the fake names used by two men who tricked business reporters into thinking they were data engineers just fired from Twitter on the day Elon Musk closed his acquisition of the company1. The pair walked up to a scrum of camera crews outside Twitter's San Francisco headquarters holding cardboard boxes stacked with desk clutter, gave sober-sounding quotes about six years of service and a Tesla payment they could no longer make, then walked off before anyone checked an employee directory2.

The last name Ligma is a long-running online setup joke that reads aloud as "lick my," with the payoff usually landing on testicles3. CNBC's Deirdre Bosa published quotes from the pair inside a same-day story about the Musk deal, and Bloomberg ran a similar piece, before both outlets pulled the interview material once the reference clicked3. The stunt became one of the defining images of the chaotic first hours of Musk-era Twitter and is still cited whenever a reporter gets caught chasing a doorstep source without verification4.

How It Spread

Between about 3 p.m. and 4:36 p.m. EST that same afternoon, Bosa posted follow-up tweets walking the story back, first noting that "some questions being raised about whether these are really twitter employees" and admitting corporate communications was not returning calls4. The Verge broke the debunk publicly after searching the Twitter email system and finding no matching accounts, a detail then picked up by the Daily Mail and other outlets that afternoon2. CNBC updated its article at 8:11 p.m. EST to strip out the interview portion, adding an editor's note that it could not confirm the identities of the two men1. Bloomberg issued its own correction after initially running with the story3.

On Twitter, mockery landed harder than the original scoop. Reporter Gene Park's line that "tech reporters are absolutely being trolled and they don't know what ligma is" pulled in thousands of likes, and @greg16676935420's summary that Rahul Ligma "was just some random dude with a box that got CNBC with a Ligma Nuts joke" hit more than 190,000 likes in three days4. A clip of the Johnson interview shared by @greg_price11 racked up 4.1 million views and 36,000 likes in the same window4. Coverage of the fooling itself ran in the Daily Mail, New York Post, Mashable, and Economic Times India within hours235.

The capstone came from Musk himself. That evening he quote-tweeted a straight-faced write-up of the prank with "Ligma Johnson had it coming," a post that pulled 659,000 likes and 63,000 retweets in three days4. On November 15, 2022, Musk posted a photo of Ligma, Johnson, and himself standing together inside Twitter's San Francisco office, framing it as a welcome visit for the two pranksters; the image cleared 279,000 likes within roughly two hours4.

How to Use This Meme

The joke works as a template for any moment when a professional gatekeeper (a reporter, a bouncer, a customer service rep) takes an obviously fake name at face value. Posters typically drop "Ligma Johnson had it coming" as a reaction to a bungled news story, or edit a screenshot of the two men with a box into any layoff or firing headline4. The core mechanic is the same as the original ligma setup: name a fake person whose surname forces the mark to say the punchline out loud.

Frequently Asked Questions