Elon Musk’s Greek Tweets and What They Mean

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Elon Musk Greek tweets
Elon Musk often tweets in Greek. Credit: U.S. Air Force/ Trevor Cokley

Elon Musk has made a habit of using Greek words or letters to post on X, formerly Twitter, sending his millions of followers scratching their heads over the meaning.

In January 2023 he tweeted Omega (Ω), the last letter in the Greek alphabet, and his tweet went viral, with 7.3 million views in a few hours.

What does Elon Musk mean by Omega?

His social media followers tried to interpret the message Musk wanted to get across. Some of those who knew that omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet assumed that Musk was about to finish something.

Some argued that Musk’s post symbolized the last place in a group of objects, others wrote that it was an attempt by the South African billionaire to show that “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end”, others joked that it refers to watch company, others deemed it symbolized the end of Twitter while others went so far as to translate the post as “the end of the coronavirus”.

Musk explained shortly afterward that he used the Omega letter as it is used in physics: Resisting the current. The ohm (symbol: Ω) is the unit of electrical resistance in the International System of Units (SI). It is named after German physicist Georg Simon Ohm.

The letter Omega (Ω) is used as a symbol in biology, biochemistry and chemistry, physics, computer science and mathematics. In sociology, is used to refer to the lowest-ranking member of a group.

Musk tweeted in Greek before

It is not the first time the business magnate and investor tweeted something that mystified his followers.

In October 2022 he tweeted just one word in Greek: “διαλεκτική,” which means dialectic and sent his millions of followers searching for their dictionaries.

The mysterious post generated more than seven thousand messages by the next morning on his official profile as, apparently, there are many question marks about the meaning hidden behind the choice of this particular word by Musk.

Dialectic (Greek: διαλεκτική), also known as the dialectical method, is a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned argumentation.

In classical Greek philosophy, dialectic is a form of reasoning based upon dialog of arguments and counter-arguments, advocating propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses).

In 2021 Elon Musk tweeted a reply by writing in ancient Greek: εἰδέναι μὲν μηδὲν πλὴν αὐτὸ τοῦτο εἰδέναι.

This translates to: “he knew nothing but one thing, that he knew nothing.” It is a paraphrase from Plato’s account of the Greek philosopher Socrates, “I know that I know nothing.”

Socrates himself was never recorded as having said this phrase, and scholars generally agree that Socrates only ever asserted that he believed that he knew nothing, having never claimed that he knew that he knew nothing.

Another recent tweet by Elon Musk upset Turkish Twitter users. The Tesla founder tweeted a meme of a Byzantine soldier who is in bed thinking to himself whether he “locked the gate” and under the image: 1453 Constantinople.

Musk’s cryptic tweet has puzzled many with Turkish users asking themselves whether it was a positive or negative tweet. Or why did Musk refer to the date the city fell? Or why didn’t he call it Istanbul?

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