"Age-old" may depend on your definition of age. I am in my upper sixties, and thought that I had a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of vulgar humor, but I had not encountered this one.
I suspect confirmation bias, and a desperate desire for these events to be true (the Musk takeover of Twitter must be bad) led to overlooking an obvious prank seemingly designed to invoke this very reaction from the media.
Hook, line and sinker.
However, the real damage is done. How many people saw the headlines and now will forever assume this event actually transpired?
Well Musk also said he'll layoff 75% of staff so it wouldn't be too surprising that he'd layoff staff. He's backtracked on that but he's still laying off staff.