City of Yellowknife abdicates responsibility for Elon Muskox’s name

The City of Yellowknife appears to be backing away from Elon Muskox as the name for its mascot outside City Hall.

In a statement to Cabin Radio on Wednesday, the city said the decorative muskox has no official name at all.

Previously, the city ran a contest to name the muskox in 2018 after it was received as a gift from Québec. The 11-foot installation originally featured in a Canada 150 horticultural show in Gatineau.

The muskox, whose body becomes a flowerbed in summer, has had pride of place outside City Hall for six years.

A Florida man won the 2018 contest by suggesting the name Elon Muskox. Yellowknife’s mayor announced the winning entry live on national television and the city issued a press release titled “The Muskox has been Named.”

The naming of the muskox received international attention.

However, what was a fun contest in 2018 isn’t seen that way by some residents in 2025.

“I just feel really embarrassed that we in Yellowknife have a connection to this extremist,” said Jordee Reid, referring to billionaire Elon Musk, the obvious inspiration for the muskox’s name.

Reid said she can’t see the muskox without thinking of Musk – who is now a key devotee of Donald Trump, a central member of an incoming United States administration that has made no secret of its authoritarian mindset, and a man accused of performing Nazi salutes during recent appearances.

“I don’t think you can go on social media without seeing that clip of Elon Musk doing essentially a Nazi salute in front of the crowd, and right away my mind went to our connection with that beautiful muskox sitting outside City Hall,” Reid said on Wednesday.

“I get that it’s funny, which I think at first I was fine with, and I imagine other Yellowknifers or northerners were. But then all of a sudden, the connection got really dark.”

Tony Florio, who first lived in Yellowknife in the 1970s and 80s before returning in 2013, said Elon Muskox “was never an appropriate name to be associated with our city.”

“With recent events in the US and globally that again demonstrate increasingly perverse values, it is my opinion as a Yellowknifer that we need to choose a name that better reflects who we are and the land we are privileged to live on,” Florio said by email.

“I would recommend we ask the Indigenous Elders for their opinion in selecting a new name.”

Name ‘not officially adopted’

In a written statement on Wednesday, the city appeared to fully disown the name despite the municipality’s high-profile 2018 campaign to announce it. (The name also appears in Yellowknife’s visitors’ guide.)

“The city has not officially adopted the name Elon Muskox and is aware that many Yellowknifers refer to this name since the contest,” the city stated, implying that if anyone is going around calling the thing Elon Muskox, that’s on them.

“The city has no plans to launch another naming contest,” the statement added.

The municipality previously declined to rename the muskox in 2022 when some Yellowknifers were disconcerted by Musk’s takeover of Twitter and accompanying political shift.

Elon Muskox was by no means a landslide winner in the 2018 naming contest, receiving only 123 out of 1,509 votes. With 300 names submitted, the voting was spread among so many entries that eight percent of the vote was enough to win.

Suggestions for replacement names have ranged from Umingmak, the animal’s Inuktitut name, to Murph, a nod to influential early Yellowknifer Gerry Murphy, for whom an arena in the vicinity of present-day City Hall was once named.

“There are so many other beautiful names this muskox could have,” said Reid.