Elon Musk's strange name change on X triggers meme coin to soar within hours

The mystery of Gorklon Rust is one that's left the internet scratching its head, and in a year that Elon Musk has gone viral for brandishing a chainsaw and wearing wedges of cheese on his head, he continues to surprise us with some unexpected moves.

After taking the reins of Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk has continued to reshape the platform in his own image, rebranding it as X.

Despite being accused of slashing billions off X's worth and controversy after he sold it to xAI, Musk doesn't look like he's going anywhere.

With him posting umpteen times a day on X, he's still its loudest voice. In a strange move, the world's richest has changed his bio from Elon Musk to 'Gorklon Rust'.

Internet sleuths have put their tin foil hats on, guessing that Gorklon is likely a reference to his Grok AI chatbot, while 'Rust' is a wink to the programming language that is part of xAI's infrastructure.

Musk is refusing to reveal exactly what's going on, although he stirred the pot further when he tagged the 'gork' parody account and wrote: "Sup @gork changed my pp (profile picture) to urs wdyt (what do you think)."

The tech billionaire has been a vocal supporter of Dogecoin and even seemingly named the Department of Government Efficiency after the meme coin, but now, could be channeling his immense wealth into a new cryptocurrency?

In the aftermath of the Grok chatbot launching as part of X, it was no surprise that a Gork meme coin soon followed suit. Still, some think that Musk himself could be behind Gork. As Musk changed his profile picture to match Gork’s, the pieces are coming together that he could be about to invest in Gork, if not, be the mastermind behind it.

Over on the Solana blockchain, Gork prices leaped 100% and hit $0.09 before levelling out.

Looking at the bigger picture, others have noted how Gork's followers include almost all of the xAI team. X is full of questions about what's going on with Gork, and in the aftermath of Haliey "Hawk Tuah Girl" Welch's meme coin debacle and President Donald Trump launching his own crypto, there are already allegations that Gork could be a pump and dump scam.

Elsewhere, critics have pointed out that despite a potential endorsement from Musk, Gork failed to reach a $100 million market capitalization.

We're reminded of when Musk changed his name to 'Kekius Maximus' and pushed the KEKIUS market cap to just over $88 million.

Analyst Ajay Kashyap took to X to write: "Notice how Elon Musk used to move billions in market cap with a single tweet & now him even changing his pfp can’t even add $50M to already super low trading memecoins 🫠 It means that people are really getting tired and moving on from chasing the next memecoin 🤔."

Whatever Musk might or might not be up to, Gorklon Rust looks like he's having fun at the expense of the rest of us.