- In recent texts, Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk discussed an award-winning Black Eyed Peas song.
- The original lyrics of "Let's Get It Started" were changed in 2004 to erase a slur in the song.
- Musk's own use of the slur on X was followed by a resurgence of posts featuring the R-word.
Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk like to keep in touch, and not just about tech.
Defense tech exec Luckey is a longtime Donald Trump supporter. Although he was hesitant to call Musk a friend, he said during an episode of the "What's News" podcast that they text each other "fairly regularly."
One of their recent exchanges veered away from politics or business, however.
Believe it or not, it was instead about the 2003 hit song by the Black Eyed Peas, "Let's Get It Started." Luckey referred to a different version of the song with a slur in the name.
"The Black Eyed Peas' Grammy-winning song, 'Let's Get Retarded,' has been taken off every single music platform and replaced with the child-safe version that was for children's sports games, 'Let's Get It Started,'" Luckey, the founder of Anduril, said.
Specifically, he said it's a collective memory "nobody even really talks about, despite everyone agreeing that it has happened."
The original lyrics were changed in 2004 for an NBA advertisement. The Black Eyed Peas and its management also received backlash over the lyrics, and the "Elephunk" album was rereleased without the old version. In 2005, "Let's Get It Started" won a Grammy in the Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group category.
Musk appears to have an affinity for using the R-word. Dozens of his posts to X use the term as an insult or in a joke. On January 6, Musk responded to a post with, "f u retard." In the days that followed, there was a 207.5% increase in posts using the word, a study by Montclair State University faculty found.
Neither Musk nor Luckey immediately responded to a request for comment by Business Insider.
You are fully retarded.
SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago.
I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused.
Return WAS pushed back for political reasons.
Idiot.
As "woke" gets an increasingly negative connotation, offensive language that had once been pushed out of the lexicon is making its way back into conversations.
Musk has made his stance against "wokeness" clear in the past. Data annotators helping to train xAI chatbot Grok were instructed to keep an eye out for "woke ideology" and "cancel culture," according to training documents previously viewed by BI.
Luckey knows a thing or two about being "canceled." He was ousted from Facebook, now Meta, in 2016 after the company was criticized for donating to an anti-Hillary Clinton political group. Meta denied that his firing was over politics.
These days he's been spending time at Trump's Mar-a-Lago with Musk and his former boss, Mark Zuckerberg — but Luckey told the podcast there are no hard feelings there.
