Elijah Daniel wanted you to fall for his fake Grimes song. On Wednesday night, the content creator and internet troll posted a video of what appeared to be him and the singer Grimes flipping off a Tesla while singing diss lyrics about Elon Musk. “Fuck a Tesla I like a Honda/And fuck an X, double entendre,” sings Grimes’ voice in the clip. Many users (and even Newsweek) fell for the troll immediately. Daniel’s plan had worked.
“Everything that I do is generally so outrageous and stupid that it would make sense for me to do it, but I wanted to see how many people would believe it off the bat,” he tells Rolling Stone. “People will just kind of automatically assume it’s real.”
The new video marks a return to the internet for Daniel after two years. The troll/creator/rapper — also known under the moniker Lil Phag — made headlines in 2013 when he petitioned for a Miley Cyrus song to become the national anthem (guess which one), and in 2016, when he tried throwing a two-foot pink dildo at Trump at a rally. He blew up on Vine at the time for his internet pranks and silly takes, and has since built a following on TikTok and Twitter. (Erm, X.)
Daniel wrote the song, titled “Nuisance,” as a Musk troll several months ago, enlisting Grammy-nominated duo SMLE to produce the track. He originally meant to find another artist to feature on the song, until he discovered Grimes’ AI generator, Elf Tech, and decided to have the track double as a Musk diss and indirect commentary on the necessity of artificial intelligence regulation after Grimes unveiled the technology last April, writing on X, “Feel free to use my voice without penalty.” Daniel says that the song takes aim at “two of the biggest advocates of AI” by using Grimes’ voice to diss the tech billionaire.
“If they want to respond, then they’re going to have to say AI needs regulation,” he says of Grimes and Musk. (The Tesla founder and musician have been in a heated custody battle over their three children for over a year, and Grimes posted in support of Musk’s trans daughter, following his transphobic remarks, back in July.) “If they don’t respond then I don’t know, maybe it’s just a song with Grimes dissing Elon Musk.”
Daniel wrote his verse and Grimes’ fake verse, and put it through Elf Tech to see if people online would believe it was real. Daniel then enlisted a “blonde friend” to put on glasses and wear a hoodie to impersonate Grimes in a clip he posted to TikTok and X. It was quickly picked up by PopCrave and even earned a like on TikTok from Julia Fox.
“I would love to say the majority of people are smart enough to not fall for AI misinformation, but they’re falling for human misinformation so I’m not sure adding a supercomputer behind it is going to help,” he says.
Daniel says he’s not personally “anti-AI,” but thinks that regulations need to be set in place on its usage, pointing to Trump posting a fake image of “Swifties for Trump” and deepfake pornography rampant on Musk’s internet. “AI has its place in the world, it just needs to be regulated,” he says. “I think it’s going to become a problem fairly soon until it’s regulated.”
“Nuisance” marks Daniel’s return online after grappling with a health scare and the death of his mother due to Covid-19 in late 2021. “I didn’t want to grieve her on the internet,” he says. Around the time away, he says he developed adult-onset epilepsy, which led to a car accident in which he shattered his foot and broke three ribs. Several months later, in May 2023, he says his epilepsy “got so bad it triggered a heart attack.” He’s since turned to fitness and focused on his health, and has found the right medication for his condition.
“I came back specifically for the election year. There’s no way that I am going to stay away from the internet during an election year,” he says. “I’m doing really good now.”
Before his step away from social media, Daniel was even profiled in the New York Times in 2020 for being an “agent of chaos” and released music as Lil Phag alongside Tana Mongeau, Bella Thorne, and CupcakKe. He wrote a parodic, erotic, gay fan-fiction inspired by Donald Trump called Trump Temptations ahead of the 2016 election, and was also detained at a Trump rally for his dildo incident.
Daniel says he doesn’t plan to attack the former president with plastic phalluses anytime soon, but he’s excited to see young voters “amped” about President Kamala Harris. “The trolling will always continue,” he says. “[But] I don’t want to get on another no-fly list.”