Although she effortlessly whacked Musk multiple times, Oates isn’t overly concerned with the billionaire. She posts frequently on both BlueSky and X about a range of topics, and is more than happy to respond to fans and critics alike on the platforms. Since publicly humiliating Musk and sending him to a tizzy, she’s gone on to tweet political musings about Zohran Mamdani, and Charlie Kirk, as well as less fraught fare about Faulkner and Hemingway and a photo of her beloved cat.
Those who are new to the online life of Joyce Carol Oates may be surprised to learn that she’s been doing these for years. At this point, she’s arguably as prolific a poster as she is a novelist, logging more than 180,00 posts on her official X account @JoyceCarolOates as of the publication of this story. Years ago, she was more likely to be the dunker than a dunkee: Oates experienced the other side of viral fame in 2014, when she loosed this hot take on another prolific but controversial writer. “Though Woody Allen has been much denounced, very likely many of his denouncers greatly admire Nabokov’s ‘Lolita.’” No contradiction?” she tweeted (it was still called tweeting back then). The false equivalency didn’t go over well; at the time, the public flogged Oates for her support of Allen. “Thats not the same at all thats terrible youre terrible but thank you for inventing oatmeal,” read one viral response, which ratioed Oates’s original tweet. (And yes, despite her last name, Joyce Carol Oates didn’t invent oatmeal.)
Years later, Oates made another Twitter faux pas, taking a gravely serious stance on innocent Halloween decorations. “You can always recognize a place in which no one is feeling much or any grief for a lost loved one & death, dying, & everyone you love decomposing to bones is just a joke,” posted Oates on October 1, 2021, drawing a wide variety of scornful reactions.
Oates kept posting through it—and now it seems that was the correct strategy. Time heals all wounds on the internet—time, and banger tweets that eviscerate the world’s richest man. Joyce Carol Oates? More like Joyce Carol Roasts.
