Elon Musk has changed his name on X. Now he is called Kekius Maximus and has as his avatar a frog dressed like a Roman soldier. The choice starts from a meme, but there is much more behind it. Pepe the frog was a meme favored by the alt-right during Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign.
A little meme, a little nerd, a little Ancient Rome, a little alt-right. THE’Elon Musk’s last choice crosses some of the worlds between which the richest man in the world moved in recent years. On X (formerly Twitter) he decided to change his name and call himself Kekius Maximus. Not only that. He also changed his profile picture, choosing an illustration probably created by artificial intelligence with Pepe The Frog dressed (approximately) as a Roman soldier holding a video game controller.
But where does it come from? Kekius Maximus? Elon Musk has a passion for video games, which lately is increasingly exposed on his X profile. A bit like the one for the right-wing German parties with extremist sympathies but this time with fewer consequences on a geopolitical level. After a long season with Diablo 4, where he seems to have achieved excellent results also at a competitive level, now it seems that his new interest is Path of Exile 2.
The origins of Kekius Maximus
Path of Exile 2 is a newborn video gameyou can enter Early Access right from the beginning of December. It’s the sequel to Path of Exilea role-playing video game developed by Grinding Bear Game in 2013 and set in a world dark fantasy. On December 31st Elon Musk explained that Kekius Maximus would have reached “level 80 of Path of Exile 2”. Posting together with the statement the frog Pepe dressed as a gladiator. Before that you can see that the Kekius Maximus formula had been published by the account DogeDesignalong with the photo of Musk with Pepe The Frog.
Elon Musk offers Wikipedia a billion dollars to change its name: it’s already the second time
The alter ego must have amused Musk, at least enough to make it his own official name on the platform. But where did this frog come from? Pepe’s story is complex. Even though this frog with anthropomorphic features is now often seen on the web, its origins need to be looked up 4chanthe forum without rules that for better or for worse has marked the history of social platforms.
Basically it is an apolitical meme but between 2015 and 2016 it became, at least in the United States, one of the favorite images of users who refer to the alt-right, the far-right current which in those years referred to Steve Bannon. The name Kekius Maximus, on the other hand, is a mix between the slang Kek and Maximus Decimus Meridius, protagonist of the film Gladiator. Kek is a word that basically means “Ahahah” but which has also, here, become an alt-right meme.
