Earlier this week, tech genius Elon Musk admitted that he considered purchasing satirical news site The Onion four years ago, but ended up deciding against it.

Instead, he poached some key members of The Onion's staff for work on his own secret project. 

Now, The Onion is firing back with its own beautiful brand of satire. And as much as we love Musk and the world-changing innovations he's spearheading, we have to admit it's pretty good.

Rumours about beef between Musk and The Onion first started in February when The Onion published a story titled "Elon Musk Offering $1.2 Billion in Grants to Any Project That Promises to Make Him Feel Complete".

screen shot 2018 03 15 at 101043pngpngautoformat2ccompressw700(The Onion)

"Calling his profound feelings of emptiness "almost too painful to bear," Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, the Boring Company, and a variety of other tech and infrastructure firms, reportedly offered $1.2 billion in grants Wednesday to any project that could make him feel complete," the article writes.

"Musk went on to offer an additional $1.2 billion to anyone who could show him the meaning of what people often refer to as "love"."

Ouch.

Then, this Tuesday, The Daily Beast confirmed that several of The Onion's former top staff members have indeed been hired by Musk's team.

As Maxwell Tani explains for The Daily Beast:

"Former Onion Editor in Chief Cole Bolton and Executive Editor Ben Berkley left the publication last year due to differences with the company's management. Since then, the two have been in Los Angeles working on the Musk project, and they recently poached three of the site's writers and a longtime editor to join them, sources confirmed."

Musk had his own tongue-in-cheek response to the speculation he was starting up his own media venture.

"It's pretty obvious that comedy is the next frontier after electric vehicles, space exploration, and brain-computer interfaces," Musk told The Daily Beast.

"Don't know how anyone's not seeing this."

He also took to Twitter to "announce" his new media project.

The Onion fired back on March 15.

The same day, they published another Musk-centred burn, titled  "Elon Musk Embarrassed After Realizing He Proposing Idea For Thing That Already Exists".

"You've got to be kidding me—I've been pouring all this money and energy into developing a concept that's already around?" said a shame-faced Musk, adding that the gaffe was extra humiliating because he'd actually been telling people about his great new idea before noticing that he was just describing a slight variation on an already successful thing," writes The Onion. 

As Kevin Litman-Navarro points out over at Inverse, another Musk dig appeared on The Onion today, although without mentioning his name, in a story titled "'The Onion' Hires Several Pastry Chefs Away From Entenmann's To Form New Bakery".

"…The Onion said in a press release this morning in which the news outlet revealed they attempted to buy Entenmann's three years ago, but ultimately declined out of disinterest in several of the company's muffin offerings. "It's fairly obvious that bakery is the next frontier after domination of online news and tailored social media content. Frankly, we don't know how anyone's not seeing this.""

We see what they did there.

And there was another take down over on subsidiary site Clickhole.

Musk has a notoriously good sense of humour (remember the flamethrower?) and has shown there's no hard feelings by retweeting the articles in question and responding.

Stay tuned to see who fires the next shot.

Meanwhile, we're still laughing over The Flat Earth Society's response to Musk last year…

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