Two former editors of The Onion are responsible for Thud’s inception. And, oddly, Elon Musk, who co-founded the company, is responsible for its financial stability.

A billionaire with some sense of humor—whether it’s your cup of tea or not—Musk is clearly drawn to satire. He has called The Onion, the satirical newspaper and website, “the greatest publication in the history of all conscious beings, living or dead.” Musk himself has not been spared from The Onion’s gaze. The outlet has repeatedly poked fun at him throughout his rise from tech-bubble entrepreneur to “real-life Iron Man,” a consistent moniker in real news media.

Thud is the brainchild of Musk along with Ben Berkley and Cole Bolton, the former top editors of The Onion who jointly departed the company in 2017. Musk originally owned Thud, but he no longer has any relationship with or formal role in the company after selling it to Berkley and Bolton in January.

Read: When Elon Musk switches on ‘insane mode’

While the Daily Beast broke the news of Thud’s existence last March, the site has been in development since the fall of 2017. Musk started talking with Berkley and Bolton four or five years ago. “He got in touch with us and just wanted to share that he enjoyed The Onion, and it was the same time that The Onion was looking for a buyer,” Bolton told me. “So I just floated it as a joke to him eventually: ‘Well, if you like it so much, you could buy it.’”

Bolton said the joke spurred an actual conversation between Musk and executives about purchasing The Onion, to which neither he nor Berkley were privy. Univision Communications bought 40 percent of the business in January 2016—a business it is now trying to sell.

Eventually, Berkley and Bolton decided it was time to leave The Onion, the publication they told me they “grew up loving and loved working [at].” Mic reported, at the time, that their resignations were “partially due to disagreements about the direction the site was taking under the ownership of Univision.” Berkley and Bolton said that while they worked there, The Onion “became their identity.” When even slight “changes were being made,” Bolton said, he got so involved in “defending the editorial side of The Onion” that it eventually “eroded [his] ability to be happy.” Berkley added that “producing satire within this nonstop news cycle takes its toll.”

Contrary to initial media reports, the pair said, Elon Musk did not “poach” them or other Onion writers to join a media company. (“I know very well that he did not recruit writers, because that’s something that I did,” Berkley said.) In the days following their joint resignation, in fall 2017, Berkley and Bolton reconnected with Musk—who had previously expressed interest in working with them. Musk had already been thinking about starting a satire website of his own, a spokesperson said, and when Berkley and Bolton contacted Musk, the three “aligned” on a general shared vision before they started a company together (originally called Pravda Corp., a name lambasted in the press after he tweeted about a separate idea for a website, also called Pravda, that would rate journalists’ credibility). Eventually, after funding a budget of just under $2 million, Musk began to worry that the satire company’s output could be weaponized against SpaceX and Tesla, and so he sold the company to Berkley and Bolton with no strings attached, the spokesperson said.