Musk Celebrates Death of the ‘Departmen of Education’ With Meme

Elon Musk, the billionaire oligarch currently destroying the U.S. federal government, celebrated President Donald Trump’s executive order on Thursday that is seeking to destroy the Department of Education in an appropriately stupid and immature fashion. Musk shared a meme with X about the move that misspelled the word “department” in the Department of Education.

pic.twitter.com/6clis9g02E

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 20, 2025

Musk, who’s worth $327 billion according to Forbes, spent about a quarter of a billion dollars helping Trump get elected and was rewarded with a job in the new administration as the head of DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The group doesn’t technically have the authority to run around to every federal agency to smash them to smithereens, but that hasn’t stopped Musk and his goons from destroying everything from the entirety of USAID to NIH funding.

Trump signed an executive order stating that Education Secretary Linda McMahon should dismantle the Department of Education, something Trump doesn’t actually have the power to do. Only Congress has the legal authority to create and destroy agencies. But that’s obviously not going to stop the destruction of the DOE, just as it didn’t stop the destruction of USAID.

The image Musk shared Thursday originally came from actor Echo Kellum’s Instagram page in 2020, where he shared a photo of actor Grant Gustin next to the grave of comic book character Oliver Queen. The grave is fake, obviously, but has been repurposed for humorous intent repeatedly ever since. There is also some question about whether Musk noticed the misspelling before he posted the meme. The meme is watermarked, suggesting he found it on X and rather than retweeting it, shared it so that he alone would get the endorphin rush of seeing something retweeted as though he’d thought of it. Musk didn’t respond to an email from Gizmodo seeking comment on Thursday.

Musk has been expressing his sadness on cable news over recent days, particularly about the fact that Tesla dealerships keep getting targeted by vandalism. But now that Musk is more or less the co-president with Trump, he’s able to mobilize tremendous resources to defend his property. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Thursday that terrorism charges would be brought against people who’ve been arrested for shooting up Tesla facilities and throwing Molotov cocktails. But even if the DOJ is able to slow the physical assault on Tesla dealerships, there’s no sign that people will start buying the electric vehicles again.

Electric vehicle sales were up overall in February, according to the news outlet Inside EVs. But Tesla sales were down 10% on the month.