Elon Musk now goes by ‘Gorklon Rust' on X: Here's what it could mean
Elon Musk - the world's richest man - has once again changed his name on X (the social media platform he owns, formerly known as Twitter). The new name on the billionaire's profile spells 'gorklon rust', leading to speculation about its meaning.
The new username is the third one used by Musk in the last six months after "Kekius Maximus" in December 2024 and "Harry Bolz" in February this year.
While the billionaire didn't give details on why he changed his name again or what it means, one possible reason could be the induction of a lightweight version of Grok to power the X recommendation algorithm.
The first part of the name, "Gorklon Rust", seems to be inspired by xAI's chatbot Grok, while the 'klon' could hint at 'clone', making the whole term mean "Grok clone". Meanwhile, the 'rust' part of the phrase could be hinting towards the Rust programming language that xAI uses in its tech stack.
There's also a meme coin linked to the name Gork on the Solana blockchain, suggesting this could also be a ploy by the billionaire to boost the cryptocurrency's visibility.
Recently, Musk also tagged the handle 'Gork' in one of his posts, which is different from the official handle of the Grok chatbot. The new handle has been around since at least early 2025 and seems to be a more humorous spin on Grok—offering irreverent replies and engaging in banter.
Meanwhile, the word Grok itself is inspired by Musk's fascination with the science fiction book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In a product announcement earlier this year, Musk explained that Grok means to fully and profoundly understand something. So far, there have been three generations of foundation models powering Grok, and Musk has announced xAI's plans to launch the new Grok 3.5 model this week.
First Published: 5 May 2025, 12:18 PM IST
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