Elon Musk's "RIP Harambe"

2019viral audio / celebrity releaseclassic

Published September 25, 2026 · Version 4.0.1

On March 30th, 2019, Tesla CEO Elon Musk uploaded a two-minute autotuned rap tribute to Harambe the Gorilla on SoundCloud under the fake label Emo G Records1. The stunt paired a Twitter handle change to "Jung Musk" with a track credited to rapper Yung Jake, producer BloodPop and singer Caroline Polachek, and racked up hundreds of thousands of streams within a weekend2.

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Overview

"RIP Harambe" is a two-minute autotuned rap song credited to Elon Musk and uploaded to SoundCloud on March 30th, 2019 under a joke label called Emo G Records, a pun on the word "emoji"1. The track is a bouncy elegy for Harambe the Gorilla, the Cincinnati Zoo silverback shot dead on May 28th, 2016, and it recycles the years-old "Dicks Out for Harambe" meme energy into a straight-faced pop song1.

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The recording plays like an internet in-joke set to music. An autotuned vocalist sings lines like "RIP Harambe / Sipping on some Bombay / We on our way to heaven / Amen, Amen" and "RIP Harambe / Smoking on some strong / In the gorilla zoo / And we thinking about you"1. Musk announced the release between tweets about the Tesla Semi, calling it "my finest work" and later joking that he was "disappointed that my record label failed"1.

Although the SoundCloud upload was staged as a Musk vanity project, credits surfaced quickly. Tweets from Musk and producer BloodPop on March 31st indicated that BloodPop produced the track and that emoji artist Yung Jake and singer Caroline Polachek co-wrote it, with Yung Jake widely presumed to be the voice on the record2.

Origin & Background

Platform
SoundCloud / Twitter (viral spread)
Key People
Elon Musk
Date
2019

The Harambe meme itself dates to May 28th, 2016, when the Western lowland gorilla was shot at the Cincinnati Zoo after a three-year-old boy fell into his enclosure, an event that fueled years of "Dicks Out for Harambe" jokes online2. "RIP Harambe" the song arrived nearly three years later. On March 30th, 2019, Elon Musk uploaded the track to an Emo G Records SoundCloud page, changed his Twitter display name to "Jung Musk" and posted a run of tweets promoting the release2. Rolling Stone reported the song passed 250,000 streams within the first day of its upload1, and per Know Your Meme it hit over 910,000 SoundCloud plays within 48 hours2.

How It Spread

Musk seeded the release himself, dropping the SoundCloud link between Tesla Semi updates on his own Twitter account while operating under the temporary "Jung Musk" handle2. The bait worked: within a single weekend Rolling Stone clocked more than 250,000 streams1, and Know Your Meme logged over 910,000 plays inside two days2.

Mainstream music and tech press picked it up almost immediately. Rolling Stone covered the upload as a surprise single tying together a Twitter joke, an old meme and Auto-Tune1. Additional writeups came from The Hill, The A.V. Club and GQ, each treating the track as a mix of celebrity stunt and unlikely pop curio2.

Reaction on Twitter was split between fans amused by a Fortune 500 CEO doing SoundCloud rap and users annoyed at the recycling of the Harambe joke, with Musk fanning both sides by joking that his "record label failed" the day after upload1. The track has stuck around as a reference point for Musk's meme-heavy online persona and as a late chapter of the Harambe meme cycle2.

How to Use This Meme

The track itself is the meme. Fans typically share the SoundCloud link with the "finest work" quote, drop the "Sipping on some Bombay / We on our way to heaven" lyric as a reply, or pair the audio with old Harambe photos and Tesla news screenshots to riff on Musk's mid-Twitter-shitpost persona.

Frequently Asked Questions