Elon Musk officially controls Twitter as of this writing, and the hysteria has been hard to miss. On Thursday, the billionaire dropped the hammer, firing several top officials, including Vijaya Gadde, who was behind the censorship of the Hunter Biden story.

But what about the rest of the employees? Reports have emerged that up to 75 percent of the social media giant’s workforce could be cut, something members of the press have wrung their hands over the last several weeks.

That’s the setup for the greatest troll of the news media I’ve ever seen, and I promise you I’m not being hyperbolic. On Friday morning, videos began to circulate of “fired Twitter employees” standing outside the company’s San Francisco headquarters. Journalists rushed to interview them in order to show that Musk was a very bad, no-good man.

They are visibly shaken. Daniel tells us he owns a Tesla and doesn’t know how he’s going to make payments.

— Deirdre Bosa (@dee_bosa) October 28, 2022

They were “visibly shaken” as they held their boxes on the street, not knowing how they’d make their next Telsa payment. Now, that should have been the first clue something was off here. Why would highly paid data engineers be living paycheck to paycheck? And the mention of a Tesla given we are talking about Elon Musk is a little odd, right? No reporter on the scene bothered to dig deeper.

Then a video of one of the men claiming that he needed “to go touch base” with his “husband and wife” started to make the rounds. Astonishgly, no red flags were raised.

Some guys just absolutely trolled local media outside Twitter's headquarters pretending to be a fired software engineer:

"I have to go touch base with my husband and wife." pic.twitter.com/B84ScRUqDk

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 28, 2022

It gets better, though. Our stalwart journalistic establishment soldiered on, getting the names of the “fired employees” and printing them. Even then, somehow, someway, they didn’t catch on to what was happening. Get a load of this and try not to die of induced laughter.

My favorite part🤣 pic.twitter.com/Bpi7aGcMj7

— Rosie Memos (@almostjingo) October 28, 2022

Get it? The men actually told the reporter that their names were “Rahul Ligma” and “Daniel Johnson,” and I’m officially dead. The guy holding up the Michelle Obama book is just putting bullets into my already cold body.

But do you want to know the best part? Even after it became apparent this was a troll to 95 percent of onlookers, one of the reporters still set out to try to “verify” if the men were real Twitter employees.

A CNBC reporter is currently trying to “verify” if a guy who told her his last name is Ligma is a real fired Twitter employee 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/hlXvFaBfWd

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 28, 2022

Let this be a lesson to the media. In their rush to get a damaging story on someone they despise, if they aren’t careful, they just might end up the target of a legendary troll. Seriously, props to these guys for pulling this off. Someone needs to buy all of them a drink.