Thud

» see thud.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 2017 Elon Musk, who had once called The Onion the greatest publication in the history of all conscious beings and had tried to buy it, offered $2 million to two of the people who ran it. Cole Bolton was editor in chief and Ben Berkley was managing editor. They took the money and left Chicago, with several Onion writers following them out.

The company was announced on 14 March 2018, when Musk tweeted the name. He explained it himself: Thud is "the sound something thick and dull makes when it hits the ground." The description the founders used was a comedy project making immersive satirical experiences, which in practice meant websites that behaved exactly like the real thing they were mocking until you got far enough in to notice.

Then the funder got nervous. Musk pulled out around December 2018, before anything had launched, reportedly because a satire company with his name on it would sooner or later aim at Tesla and SpaceX. Bolton and Berkley bought his stake, launched in March 2019 with nobody behind them, and were gone by May.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what they actually shipped ~

DNA Friend was the one that landed. It presented itself as a mail-in genetic testing service, complete with testimonials and a results page, and the joke ran all the way down to the collection method. CNBC covered it on 18 March 2019 as a real product launch with a straight face in the headline, which was the whole objective.

The others came out around it. TacStorm sold tactical gear to people who did not need any, and Ploog sold a universal adapter in the same register. A personality quiz called the 6 Minute Test and a Los Angeles restaurant guide called Mampfen filled in the rest. Then there was 833-GET-THUD, a toll-free number that answered and walked you into a customer service menu with no customer service at the end of it.

~ the investor problem ~

Bolton later told The Verge that the investors they approached after Musk could not work out what was being satirized. That is the sharp end of the format. A parody site that passes for real has no genre marker on it, so the pitch meeting has to carry the explanation that the product is built to avoid, and the money looks at a DNA testing company with a strange results page and asks about the revenue model.

~ what is still up ~

dnafriend.com still answers today, seven years after the company that made it stopped existing. tacstorm.com is parked on a domain reseller with a price on it, and thud.com redirects away to somewhere else entirely.

From Ankara this whole episode registered as a line in somebody's news feed about a billionaire and a joke website, and the satire itself was the kind that depends on knowing exactly which American brand is being imitated. The part that travels is the business lesson, which is that a comedy company can be killed by its own investor before the first joke goes out the door.

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