Elon Musk's Off-Color Joke About New Texas College Fails To Land

Elon Musk, whose personal fortune this month topped $300 billion, today quipped on Twitter: "Am thinking of starting new university: Texas Institute of Technology & Science."

A Twitter user asked him if the funding was secured, to which Musk replied: "Funding secured", adding it "will have epic merchandise."

However, many users apparently failed to comprehend the world's richest man was potentially making a juvenile joke riffing on the TITS acronym.

The world's richest man, who Newsweek has approached for comment, announced earlier in October his electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla is moving its headquarters to Texas, a U.S. state where cars cannot be sold directly to consumers.

Possibly as a result, many of the controversial South African billionaire's 61 million Twitter followers missed the not-so nuanced joke, triggering a heated online discussion.

Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Dan Whitfield apparently took the tweet at face value, commenting: "You should make it tuition-free and guarantee high scoring graduates jobs at Tesla or space x," adding a thumbs-up emoji.

At the 'Satellite 2020' conference in Washington D.C., recently, Musk responded to an audience member by saying that college was unnecessary because "you can learn anything you want for free".

"I think college is basically for fun and to prove that you can do your chores, but they're not for learning," Musk said.

He also said that he hopes to make sure his electric car company Tesla does not have university requirements for jobs, "because that's absurd."

However, the quip was picked-up by numerous Twitter suers, with wags such as Chicken Genius asking: "How many lecture halls? 69 or 420?"

Lex Fridman added: "It should have a College Of Computing & Statistics." And Lance Atredeis suggested a name: "Department of Informatics Computation and Kinetics."

The man responsible for SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company has recently been flexing his funny bone to share his word puns.

On October 25 he wrote: "Macrohard >> Microsoft" adding immediately afterwards: "Although Teams is pretty good."

However, the entrepreneur's recent foray into comedy failed to land with many. Twitter user Paul appeared unimpressed writing: "Maybe a joke for 20-30 years ago dude."

The news coincides with Musk criticizing the billionaires tax this month, after responding to a tweet, which included a template designed to be sent to lawmakers in opposition to the tax.

"I anticipate that any new unrealized capital gains taxes will slowly make their way down to middle class retirement investments over the next several years. It will start with billionaires, then eventually millionaires, then the modest investments will get hit possibly within a decade," the template read.

Musk replied: "Exactly. Eventually, they run out of other people's money and then they come for you."