Elon Musk posted a photo of Changpeng Zhao at 6:56 a.m. UTC on Friday. He skipped words completely. Asia's stock markets had already lost more than $1 trillion that morning10. Musk's silent jab still beat every post about that crash for likes, by midday1456.
The two men have traded jabs before. This time, the joke traveled faster than the crash it rode in on.
A Thread That Started With "Good Morning"
Billy Markus, Dogecoin's co-creator, posted first. He had just woken up in Japan. “good morning from japan all! just woke up, let's see how the market is doing!” he wrote at 9:19 p.m. UTC Thursday3.
Musk answered almost ten hours later. His reply carried one picture: a blurry, red-tinted photo of Zhao. The photo was a callback to the red candles flashing across crypto charts that morning, TipRanks reported8. Musk left the caption field empty.
Zhao replied 47 minutes after that, at 7:43 a.m. UTC. His picture showed a cartoon figure crouched on the ground, an arrow through its bleeding leg. The pose comes from the well-worn "Skyrim" line about taking an arrow to the knee, TipRanks reported8.
Zhao founded Binance and ran it until 2023. He pleaded guilty that year to enabling money laundering, paid a $50 million fine and stepped down as chief executive17. Four months in prison followed, in 2024. President Trump pardoned him on Oct. 23, 2025, clearing the conviction from his record. He kept his following and his public voice through all of it, and that voice is what Friday's photo tested.
Yi He, Binance's co-founder and co-CEO, joined at 8:49 a.m. UTC. She quoted Musk's post with red and green versions of the same photo of Zhao. The colors framed the choice between the two pills from "The Matrix." "Which colored pill do you choose?" she asked7.
Both sides, in their own words
Does a joke now draw more eyes than a market crash?
“Elon, have a lot of respect for you, but bad time to troll. Please stop”
“Over $1 TRILLION wiped out from Asian stock markets. South Korea's KOSPI -6%, wiping out ₩305.0 Trillion ($203B)”
The Receipts
By late morning, the numbers told their own story. Musk's post held 34,977 likes and 2,916 replies at 12:12 UTC1. Zhao's reply held 4,423 likes the same minute2.
Compare that against the morning's crash coverage. Watcher.Guru's post on South Korea's circuit breaker held 8,056 likes4. Its Nikkei bear-market post held 4,9145. Bull Theory's detailed account of the trillion-dollar rout held 1,9206.
Add those three crash posts together. Their combined 14,890 likes still trail Musk's single photo by more than 20,0001456. A single picture, posted with an empty caption field, pulled in more attention than three separate accounts of Nov. 6's trillion-dollar rout.
Musk's Wordless Photo Outdrew Every Crash Post for Likes, Nov. 6, 2026
Likes on six X posts about Friday's crash or the Musk-CZ memes, as of 12:12 UTC
Read the chart as a table
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Musk (@elonmusk) | 34,977 likes |
| Watcher.Guru: Korea crash | 8,056 likes |
| Watcher.Guru: Japan bear market | 4,914 likes |
| CZ's reply (@cz_binance) | 4,423 likes |
| Bull Theory: $1T rout | 1,920 likes |
| Yi He's meme (@heyibinance) | 1,487 likes |
An early read of the morning's chatter credited Yi He's own post with sending the meme coin GM soaring. That post held fewer likes than any of the six: 1,4877. GM's rally had already started hours before she posted. Credit belongs further up the thread than that early read placed it.
Replies told a similar story. Musk's post drew 2,916 of them, more than every other post in the thread combined127. A picture that skipped every word still pulled the most words out of its readers.
Views carried the same gap. Musk's photo logged 1,817,877 views by 12:12 UTC, more than six times the 286,212 views on Zhao's own reply12. His X account counts 241 million followers, a reach past any single crash report in the thread. Reach alone rarely explains a six-to-one gap between two posts on the same screen.
A Coin Named for a Good Morning
GREEN MORNING is a meme coin on BNB Chain that trades under the ticker GM. GM held a market cap of $2.72 million at 7:55 a.m. UTC Friday, up more than 400 percent that morning, KuCoin reported16. Its price had slid since an October peak near $15.36 million.
By 9:22 a.m. UTC, after Yi He posted, the coin's market cap reached $7.13 million, a 24-hour gain past 1,180 percent, PANews reported9.
GM's Market Cap Nearly Tripled as the Meme Thread Grew, Nov. 6
GREEN MORNING's market cap at two points Friday, in millions of dollars
- After Yi He posts: $7.13M
- After CZ's reply: $2.72M
Sources: PANews [9]; KuCoin [16].
Read the chart as a table
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| After CZ's reply | $2.72M | 7:55 UTC |
| After Yi He posts | $7.13M | 9:22 UTC |
The ticker matched the morning's mood. Markus had greeted his followers with "good morning" before any of the memes began3. Whether traders bought GM for that joke or for the thread it rode, the coin's climb tracked the posts hour for hour. A coin with a $15 million peak behind it and a $2.72 million floor under it still gained seven figures. Two photos and a movie reference did that.
A Rivalry With a Longer History
Friday's exchange picked up a fight that started the week before. North Korea-linked hackers took $6.3 billion from Binance on Oct. 29, and Musk mocked the breach in public. He answered Zhao's own security warning with fire and laughing emojis. Then he wrote "Everyday is Zeroday" under a post about the stolen funds, crypto.news reported13.
Zhao asked him to stop. “Elon, have a lot of respect for you, but bad time to troll. Please stop,” he wrote on Oct. 3013. Then he pointed to a stake that ties his own fortune to Musk's company. “Our SPCX shares (from our $500m investment in your Twitter takeover) are worth more than a billion,” Zhao wrote. The line tied Binance's balance sheet to SpaceX's valuation.
That history explains why Friday's photos skipped words so easily. Readers already knew the joke.
What the Likes Skip
Musk's photo won the morning by likes. Asia's markets carried the morning's real story by money. Bull Theory posted the numbers at 3:51 a.m. UTC, five hours before Musk's photo appeared. “Over $1 TRILLION wiped out from Asian stock markets. South Korea's KOSPI -6%, wiping out ₩305.0 Trillion ($203B),” the account wrote6.
Japan's Nikkei 225 fell into a bear market on Nov. 6, erasing about $450 billion. China's Shanghai Composite dropped 1.5 percent, erasing about $210 billion. Together they pushed the region's one-day loss past $1 trillion, Bitcoin.com News reported10.
Bitcoin slid with the broader market, trading at $76,080.80 at 12:12 UTC, down 5.1 percent over 24 hours, CoinGecko showed15. Traders lost more than $1 billion in forced liquidations across the same stretch, most of them long bets on higher prices10.
Alex Thorn, Galaxy's head of firmwide research, argued bitcoin's drop carried a narrower cause than the panic suggested. "None of the people freaking out about AI own Bitcoin," he said. "It's not in their inventory to sell," Unchained reported11. CoinGabbar's own report called the morning's fear overstated too. The report pointed to Republican control of Congress through January 2027 as a limit on how far new AI rules could reach12.
A reader can hold both numbers at once: a joke that drew 34,977 likes, and a region that lost $1 trillion the same morning. Friday showed what crypto's attention rewards. The money moved somewhere else entirely, one scroll below the joke for anyone who looked. A trader checking Musk's feed for a read on the market got a photo of a man he had mocked the week before. The same trader, scrolling to Watcher.Guru's feed, found the number that actually moved a portfolio.
By the numbers
- Musk's post: 34,977 likes and 2,916 replies, as of 12:12 UTC on Nov. 61.
- Zhao's reply: 4,423 likes at the same minute2.
- Best crash post: Watcher.Guru's South Korea circuit-breaker post held 8,056 likes4.
- Asia's loss: more than $1 trillion erased across Korea, Japan and China on Nov. 610.
- Bitcoin: $76,080.80, down 5.1 percent over 24 hours, as of 12:12 UTC on Nov. 615.
- GM's market cap: $7.13 million, up more than 1,180 percent in 24 hours, as of 9:22 UTC on Nov. 69.
- Liquidations: more than $1 billion in forced crypto positions closed, most of them long bets10.
What to watch
Watch whether GM's rally holds once the memes fade, or slides back toward its October lows. Whether Zhao's next Binance announcement can match Friday's 34,977 likes on its own is worth tracking too. Either answer will show where crypto's readers point their eyes next: at the executives, or at the markets they run.
Sources
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk), X post, Nov. 6, 2026, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2118598389290144075
- Changpeng Zhao (@cz_binance), X post, Nov. 6, 2026, https://x.com/cz_binance/status/2118610164198641751
- Billy Markus (@BillyM2k), X post, Nov. 5, 2026, https://x.com/BillyM2k/status/2118453212542099848
- Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru), X post, Nov. 6, 2026, https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/2118496338094547186
- Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru), X post, Nov. 6, 2026, https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/2118508896864424256
- Bull Theory (@BullTheoryio), X post, Nov. 6, 2026, https://x.com/BullTheoryio/status/2118551861666148842
- Yi He (@heyibinance), X post, Nov. 6, 2026, https://x.com/heyibinance/status/2118626855976931477
- Annika Masrani, "Elon Musk and Changpeng "CZ" Zhao Revive Feud With Meme Exchange as Crypto Markets Crash," TipRanks, Nov. 6, 2026, https://www.tipranks.com/news/elon-musk-and-changpeng-cz-zhao-revive-feud-with-meme-exchange-as-crypto-markets-crash
- PANews, "He Yi Joins Musk-CZ Meme Exchange as Meme Coin GM Surges Over 1,180% in 24 Hours," Nov. 6, 2026, https://panews.io/articles/01a1b032-089f-7648-a76f-fd27e4c2c787
- Shiraz Jagati, "Bitcoin Clings to $75K as Asian Markets Lose Over $1 Trillion in a Day," Bitcoin.com News, Nov. 6, 2026, https://news.bitcoin.com/market-updates/asia-stocks-1-trillion-crash-kospi-bitcoin-75k/
- David Okoya, "Bitcoin Slides to a Seven-Week Low Near $75,200 as AI Stocks Drag Wall Street Lower," Unchained, Nov. 6, 2026, https://unchainedcrypto.com/bitcoin-slides-to-a-seven-week-low-near-75200-as-ai-stocks-drag-wall-street-lower/
- Sakshi Jain, "Crypto News Nov 6: Bitcoin Falls 6%, Midterm Rally Fades, Fear Returns," CoinGabbar, Nov. 6, 2026, https://www.coingabbar.com/en/crypto-news-today-november-6-2026-bitcoin-eth-falls-fear-index
- Olivia Stephanie, "CZ fires back at Elon Musk over Binance hack jokes, cites $1B SpaceX stake," crypto.news, Oct. 30, 2026, https://crypto.news/cz-elon-musk-stop-trolling-binance-hack/
- Coinpedia, "Asia Stock Market Loses $1 Trillion, Bitcoin Falls Below $76,000 Amid Global Sell-Off," KuCoin, Nov. 6, 2026, https://www.kucoin.com/news/flash/asia-stock-market-loses-1-trillion-bitcoin-falls-below-76-000-amid-global-sell-off
- CoinGecko, Bitcoin price page, retrieved Nov. 6, 2026, https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin
- Coinpedia, "Meme Coin GREEN MORNING Surges Over 400% Amid Elon Musk's CZ Meme Post," KuCoin, Nov. 6, 2026, https://www.kucoin.com/news/flash/meme-coin-green-morning-surges-over-400-amid-elon-musk-s-cz-meme-post
- TechCrunch, "Trump pardons Binance founder Changpeng Zhao," Oct. 23, 2025, https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/23/trump-pardons-binance-founder-changpeng-zhao