- Elon Musk posted an apparently innocent meme joking about Ice Cube's name.
- But the NWA rapper didn't take it lightly and compared Twitter to a flaming dumpster.
Elon Musk waded into another clash on Thursday, as Ice Cube appeared to take offense at a meme posted by the billionaire.
The X owner shared a seemingly innocuous image on his platform, captioned: "Remember Ice Cube? This is him now, feel old yet?"
It poked fun at the NWA rapper's name with a side-by-side of him and a glass of water.
Musk posted it after replying with a laughing emoji to a user who earlier shared the same image.
But the "Boyz n The Hood" actor didn't take the joke lightly, and fired back with a meme of his own, comparing Twitter to a flaming dumpster under Musk's ownership.
https://t.co/udUtB1YJWP pic.twitter.com/pYdQmTKKer
— Ice Cube (@icecube) September 14, 2023
Since Musk took over Twitter last November, the company has faced mounting difficulties.
It faced several outages after Musk spent Christmas Eve moving the company's data servers from Sacramento to Portland, Oregon, as recounted in Walter Isaacson's biography.
Moves like temporarily limiting the number of posts a user could view, and introducing paid verification have also irritated some users.
Twitter has struggled to retain advertisers and Isaacson said Musk's purchase was "insane" because he lacks empathy — a key requirement in such an ad-heavy business.
According to Fidelity, which owns a stake in the company, Twitter is now worth just one third of the $44 billion Musk paid for it.
Ice Cube previously provoked controversy on Twitter in 2020 after sharing a number of anti-Semitic images and conspiracy theories.
And as Musk first began his acquisition of the social network in April 2022, Ice Cube directly appealed for him to "take off my shadow ban."
X did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.