On Wednesday, June 4, 2026, Doja Cat logged onto X and did something that is simultaneously very on-brand and objectively unhinged: she asked the world’s richest man to restore a discontinued feature on his platform, then called him a “barrel chested ewok” in the same breath. The request was genuine. The insults were also genuine. The odds of her getting what she wants are, at best, complicated.
The posts spread fast. By the time most of the internet woke up Thursday morning, “barrel chested ewok” was already shorthand for a very specific kind of celebrity-tech-mogul confrontation: one where a Grammy-winning artist publicly dresses down a man worth hundreds of billions of dollars over a voice note feature, and somehow manages to be both the most chaotic and most relatable person in the room.
What makes this more than a viral moment is the broader context it sits inside. Doja Cat and Elon Musk have history. X has a history. The $1.5 million SEC settlement Musk just wrapped up has a history. And the question of what X actually is now, three and a half years after its owner rewired every inch of it, is one the internet keeps asking and never quite getting a straight answer to.
The Posts, In Full
Doja Cat took to X on Wednesday to request that the platform’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, reinstate the “audio post” feature. The approach she chose was, to put it gently, unconventional.
In her first post, she wrote: “Hey Elon if u see this please put the audio post feature back on here. Thanks, u frog build looking (expletive removed). Barrel chested ewok u look like u eat sand.”
When a fan teased Doja for not tagging Musk in her post because she’s “not about that life,” the singer followed it up with a second message in which she doubled down on her criticisms of his looks. This time, she tagged him directly. In that follow-up she wrote: “Put the audio post feature back on this app. Thanks, you hairless no-neck havin, chimpanzee. Face look like it was drawn from memory. When u swim on ur back at the beach (expletive removed) look like a man o’ war. Hourglass ankles.” She wrapped the second post with: “Not tryna be mean though, sorry.”
The half-apology at the end is doing much. So is the phrase “face look like it was drawn from memory,” which is arguably the most complete roast of any human being in under ten words and will almost certainly outlive all of us.
The Feature She Actually Wants Back
The specific grievance here is worth understanding, because it isn’t arbitrary. Doja Cat is most likely referring to voice notes, or the audio post feature, which seemed to be discontinued on X sometime in early 2025, according to user posts complaining that the feature had been removed. While public audio posts are no longer widely available, users are still able to send voice messages through direct messaging features.
Posting a voice clip to your public feed, where followers can listen in their timeline without clicking away, is a different kind of creative tool than sending a DM. For artists, comedians, and anyone whose voice is part of their public persona, the audio post format was genuinely useful. Doja Cat, a prolific user of X, called on the micro-blogging site’s billionaire owner to bring back its audio post feature and filled her message with derogatory comments about Musk’s appearance.
Whether the decision to remove the public audio feature was strategic, cost-driven, or simply low on the priority list for a platform that has been reengineering itself non-stop since late 2022, X has not publicly explained. What’s clear is that at least one high-profile user noticed, and was not understated about it.
X Under Musk: The Numbers Behind the Drama
To understand why any of this has weight beyond celebrity gossip, it helps to look at what has actually happened to the platform since Musk took it over. Musk closed the deal for X, then called Twitter, in October 2022, and swiftly removed the site’s senior executive team.
The first year did not go smoothly. In September 2023, global web traffic to twitter.com was down 14% year-over-year, and U.S. traffic was down 19%, according to a Similarweb report. On mobile, it was no better: combined monthly active users for iOS and Android in the U.S. fell 17.8% year-over-year. The advertiser exodus compounded the problem. Musk’s unpredictable behavior and public statements triggered a major pullback by brands wary of brand safety risks. X peaked at $5.08 billion in global revenue in 2021. By 2024, that figure had fallen to an estimated $2.5 billion, a 13.7% drop from 2023’s $2.9 billion.
The feature changes, the content moderation overhauls, the subscription model reworks, and the rebranding from Twitter to X have all been part of Musk’s vision for what the platform should become. Users, advertisers, and apparently Grammy winners are still waiting to see how it resolves.
The SEC Settlement and the Math of $1.5 Million
Before the Doja Cat posts, Musk was already in the news for a different kind of confrontation. The Securities and Exchange Commission reached a settlement with Elon Musk over the delayed disclosure of his stake in Twitter, the platform now known as X. Musk agreed to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty.
The backstory: the SEC accused Musk of failing to properly disclose when his stake in then-Twitter surpassed 5 percent, as he increased his shares in the company in early 2022. He disclosed the stake in April of that year, when he owned more than 9 percent of Twitter. The agency argued this allowed him to underpay for his shares by more than $150 million.
The agency touted the fine as the largest penalty it has ever obtained in a case involving this specific type of securities violation. Yet it represents only 1% of the savings the SEC alleged Musk gained. Under the settlement, Musk admits no liability and retains the funds the SEC previously claimed were improperly acquired.
For context on what $1.5 million means to Musk: a 2025 report from The Hill cited his fortune in the hundreds of billions, making the penalty a fraction of a rounding error on any given Tuesday. One legal expert called it “a modest sum for the richest person on the planet” while noting it still sends a message that disclosure rules apply to everyone.
This Isn’t the First Round
The June 4 posts are not the first time Doja Cat and Musk have crossed paths online. This isn’t the first time Doja Cat has taken aim at Musk online. In 2024, he posted a racist meme about diversity in film and she replied…well she replied in a way which we can’t repeat but the essence of her message was “stop talking” but in a much more Doja-esque verbiage.
That exchange was shorter, sharper, and less anatomically specific than Wednesday’s posts. But it established a pattern: Doja Cat has a very low tolerance for Musk’s online behavior and no apparent interest in staying diplomatic about it.
She’s not alone in the music world. Musk previously had a run-in with Billie Eilish after Eilish called him a “coward” for hoarding wealth during a global crisis. Eilish singled Musk out after using her acceptance speech at the WSJ Innovator Awards to call out billionaires for hoarding their wealth. Musk replied to the criticism by saying, “She’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.” His response to Doja Cat, as of publication, has been silence.
When Eilish went at him, Musk fired back publicly. When Doja Cat called him a barrel chested ewok with hourglass ankles, nothing. At the time of writing, there has been no public response from Musk regarding Doja Cat’s request or her remarks.
The Platform’s Identity Problem
X retains a critical mass of prominent, vocal, culturally influential users, people who can generate enormous engagement and attention. But those same users are watching features they relied on disappear, watching the product shift in directions that don’t always serve their needs, and occasionally directing the frustration straight at the man in charge.
A slew of big names ranging from Mark Hamill to Barbra Streisand famously left X behind for Bluesky. Others stayed. Doja Cat stayed, posts on the platform regularly, and clearly cares enough about its features to make a public scene about them. She keeps showing up, keeps using it, keeps picking fights on it. For a platform whose cultural relevance is regularly questioned, that kind of noisy engagement is more valuable than it looks.
The Ewok reference, for what it’s worth, is more efficient than a thousand think-pieces. The comparison refers to the small, furry, bear-like creatures in the Star Wars universe. They are, by design, not intimidating. The implication doesn’t need translation.
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What Happens Next
Nothing, probably. Musk does not appear to be in a hurry to respond, and X’s product decisions are not typically driven by individual user complaints, even unusually colorful ones. Although it’s still possible to send audio notes via DM, Doja Cat is still vexed, and she’s made that vexation roughly as public as it’s possible to make anything in 2026.
What Wednesday’s episode actually represents is a very modern form of accountability: imprecise, chaotic, funny, and powered entirely by an audience. A celebrity with 30 million followers deciding that the best use of her public platform is to call the world’s richest man a barrel chested ewok over a discontinued voice note feature. Musk, sitting on a fortune that makes the GDP of several European nations look modest, saying nothing back.
There’s something genuinely funny about that, and something genuinely telling. X is still home to some of the loudest, most culturally significant voices on the internet. Those voices have opinions about how the platform is run. And when the features they use get quietly removed, some of them will say so with the specific kind of creative vocabulary that makes “face look like it was drawn from memory” trend globally before breakfast.
The audio post feature probably isn’t coming back. But the clip of this exchange will live on the internet forever, which is arguably a better outcome for everyone except Elon Musk.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.