With big brands, including Disney and Apple, having ditched X (formerly Twitter) and despite owner Elon Musk’s message to fleeing advertisers to “go f*** yourself,” PETA is offering to step up and cover some of his lost revenue with an advertisement of our own: an image of Musk in clown face with the message “While Elon Clowns Around … Monkeys and Pigs Die Painfully in His Labs. No Joke.”

PETA’s ad of Elon as a clown references animal experiments conducted by Musk’s company Neuralink, which drills into the skulls of monkeys and pigs to implant brain chips.

Between 2018 and 2022, Neuralink killed approximately 1,500 animals in its experiments, including more than 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys—and Musk stated that some monkeys’ deaths were due to using animals who weren’t very healthy to begin with.

Out of 23 monkeys known to have been strapped into chairs and used in Neuralink’s brain-computer implant experiments at the University of California–Davis’ primate center between 2017 and 2020, at least 15 died.

Experimenters screwed steel posts into the skulls of macaque monkeys and used an unapproved substance called “BioGlue,” which killed monkeys by destroying portions of their brains.

Monkeys also suffered from facial trauma, seizures, and recurrent infections at implantation sites.

Musk’s reckless, gruesome animal experiments are a circus, not science. PETA wants him to stop clowning around and find it in his heart, if he has one, to leave animals out of his games and focus on human-relevant research.

Urge the National Institutes of Health to close down cruel national primate research centers: