In between attempting to post through being tarred and feathered for transforming Twitter into the world’s silliest pay-to-win, Elon Musk is being asked to pay royalties to a manga artist after posting a popular anime meme.
The anime meme in question was a painfully unfunny use of the Crying Aya Asagiri girl asking the bearded dude from those Yes Chad memes to turn on Google Maps. The attempted joke’s punchline was that the Chad-man refuses because he prefers to let his instincts guide him. Ba-dum-tsss. Naturally, Elon simps flooded both his low-effort meme and subsequent “We’ve all been there” reply with hundreds of thousands of dick-riding likes. One person who didn’t find the lonesome new Twitter owner’s cringe-arse anime meme humorous was Kentaro Sato, the artist behind the Crying Aya Asagiri girl’s image. In fact, Sato wants the world’s richest man to pay him one billion dollars for using his art without permission.
Twitter社新CEOイーロン・マスクがTwitterで僕の絵を無断転載してるのでとりあえず使用料10億よろしくお願いします。ドルで。 https://t.co/QXU7uLkLJB
— 佐藤健太郎@不死と罰2巻発売中 (@sato_ken_taro) November 7, 2022
“Elon Musk, the new CEO of Twitter, has reprinted my picture on Twitter without permission, so please give me 1 billion for the usage fee. in dollars,” Sato wrote, according to a Google translation.
In the replies to Sato’s tweet, the mangaka posted panels from Magical Girl Site, the manga from which the popular crying meme originates, as well as an Amazon link to the manga’s first volume.
Of course, this isn’t the first time his Muskness has been called out for posting uncredited images on Twitter for the sake of memes. Back in May, the satirical video game site Hard Drive embarrassed Musk in a series of tweets for posting a cropped screenshot of one of its articles without giving it credit.
is posting @HardDriveMag articles without credit the worst thing that Elon Musk has done? not even close. but is it fun that we probably made the richest man on earth feel shitty today? a little bit, yea. a little bit pic.twitter.com/wc6TzqjbXW
— Jeremy Kaplowitz (@jeremysmiles) May 30, 2022
“The reason you’re not that funny is because you’re woke,” Musk wrote to Hard Drive. “Humour relies on an intuitive & often awkward truth being recognised by the audience, but wokism is a lie, which is why nobody laughs.”
As was inevitable, Musk deleted his tweet.
Elon Musk’s habit of not crediting artists falls in line with a tweet of his from 2019 in which the emerald mine profiteer claimed that online images exist to be stolen and that “no one should be credited with anything ever.”Keep in mind that this is the same man who reposted Nier: Automata 2B fanart within months of paying a settlement in a case over using an artist’s work without credit that same year.
While it’s uncertain whether Sato will seriously pursue taking Musk to task for posting cringe of his artwork, his demanding Musk pay a Dr. Evil-esque amount of cash is certainly funnier than anything Musk posted.
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