Though Elon Musk is no stranger to bad pranks — remember when he turned Twitter’s logo into Doge … two days after the holiday? — his worst gag yet came back in 2018, when he tweeted that Tesla had gone bankrupt. Musk may have been joking around but his shareholders were not, Tesla’s stock plummeting 7% after the offending post.

Famed as the official restaurant of stoned 20-somethings, Taco Bell once tried to expand their horizons, attempting to venture into the world of artifact archival back in 1996 … at least as a bit. After taking out a full-page ad in several newspapers claiming they had bought the Liberty Bell in order to help ameliorate the United State’s national debt, the National Park Service was flooded with calls from politicians and ultimately held a press conference denying the sale.

2016 was a decidedly chaotic year, however Google decided to make it worse by pranking all Gmail users with a “Mic Drop” function, which let emailers "send and mic drop,” or a gif of a Despicable Me Minion dropping a microphone to signify a conversation was over. Some users may have found the gag funny, but several others — including the bosses of some who were sent the gif by accident — were not amused.

Virgin overlord Richard Branson may be no stranger to air and space travel, yet the same cannot be said of the authorities in London, after they were ready to go to war with what they believed to be a UFO full of ETs … that was actually just a hot air balloon. While "the police didn’t see the funny side of it and threatened to arrest us for wasting their time," per the exec, they ultimately “joined in the fun and left with smiles on their faces."