Elon Musk tried to quote Dune and got it completely wrong

It's been less than a month since Elon Musk's Twitter takeover, and there have certainly been some notable changes. But now, the self-titled "free speech absolutist" has been called out by his very own fact-checker.

On Tuesday (November 22), Musk quoted a line from Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel, Dune – or so he thought.

The famous 1965 classic has since evolved into several movie adaptations over the years, with the most recent being directed by Denis Villeneuve in 2021.

Musk penned, "Fanaticism is always a function of repressed doubt," before confidently attributing the quote to Dune.

Twitter immediately flagged the tweet with a notice to set it straight. "This is not a quote from the book “Dune” but from the psychologist Carl Jung," it read. "The actual quote is “Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt."

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The blunder left fellow Twitter users in hysterics, with one humouring: "Spent 44 billion to get corrected by his own employees."

Another added: "There's just one disgruntled employee whose job it is to fact-check shit you know he’s doing this just to see how far he can go before he’s fired."

Meanwhile, Musk fans weren't far behind, with one jumping to his defence, saying: "He was just checking if the bot works."

Others joked that "hopefully Elon doesn’t fire them", referring to the mass layoffs of around 3,700 Twitter employees worldwide – because he had "no choice".

"Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day. Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required," he tweeted earlier this month.

More members of staff has since parted ways with the company after being served an ultimatum to work “extremely hardcore" or leave.

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