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Elon Musk Sued for $15 Million by Prankster Cards Against Humanity Company

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Cards Against Humanity, the company behind the popular card game of the same name, is suing Elon Musk for $15 million after accusing employees of the billionaire’s SpaceX company of trespassing and vandalizing a property on the U.S.-Mexico border, just one of many pranks the company has leveled against Musk over the years.

Key facts

On Thursday, Cards Against Humanity sued Musk in Texas state court, alleging that SpaceX, which is headquartered nearby, trespassed on the property and cleared vegetation without permission, dumped gravel on the property and used it to store construction equipment and vehicles.

The lawsuit alleges that SpaceX “treated the property as its own for at least six months” without Cards Against Humanity’s consent, damaging its natural habitat, which the company says will cost $15 million to repair.

The piece of land in question near Brownsville, Texas, was purchased in 2017 for more than $2 million donated by Cards Against Humanity supporters after the company announced it wanted to buy the plot of land to thwart then-President Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico to curb illegal immigration.

Cards Against Humanity has pledged that “Trump’s wall will take as long and as expensive as possible to build” and has purchased the property with $15 in donations from 150,000 different people.

Because the land was purchased with fan money for a specific purpose, the company also claims that SpaceX’s use of the property has “caused damage” to its relationship with the fans, suggesting there may be an ongoing agreement between the two companies, even though “nothing could be more offensive to Cards Against Humanity,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit also attacks Musk personally, claiming he stole land “without remorse or even explanation, which has become a public reputation around the world” and citing a New York Times article that claims that charitable promises Musk made to the Texas county where SpaceX is headquartered “were either not fulfilled or were made to promote his own company.”

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Cards Against Humanity A History of Political Jokes and Exploits

In its lawsuit, Cards Against Humanity claims that it often uses jokes and stunts — such as buying land in Texas — to draw attention to specific issues or “people who ignore the rights and problems of ordinary people for their own enrichment or aggrandizement.” The complaint specifically notes that both Trump and Musk have been targeted. In 2016, months before Trump’s primary election against Hillary Clinton, the company began selling expansion packs for its games called “Vote for Hillary” and “Vote for Trump” and stated that the proceeds from both games would go to Clinton’s campaign. The company also began taking down billboards as part of a political action committee it founded called the Nuisance Committee and targeted the future president with signs that read, “If Trump is so rich, why didn’t he buy this billboard?” and “Donald Trump, he can’t read this but is afraid of it.” In 2022, the company offered users a discount code if they could solve challenging CAPTCHA puzzles — such as one in which users had to select photos of a bicycle to prove they were human. In one puzzle, users had to successfully identify which CAPTCHAs contained “assholes,” including characters like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Tucker Carlson, and others. Last November, the company launched a prank-style social media platform as a parody of Musk’s X site, formerly known as Twitter, called Yowza, where posting that single word was the only thing a user could do. The site was “guaranteed to be free of misinformation, hate speech, and bad vibes of any kind,” and launched amid growing criticism that both misinformation and hate speech had skyrocketed on Musk’s site since he took it over.

Further reading

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