But That's None of My Business

The "But That's None of My Business" meme — Kermit the Frog calmly sipping Lipton tea while delivering devastating social commentary — originated from a 2014 Lipton commercial featuring The Muppets that aired during the Academy Awards. The image was first paired with the now-iconic sarcastic tagline on Instagram on June 17, 2014, and within four days, a dedicated Instagram account had amassed over 130,000 followers. It became the internet's definitive tool for polite, passive-aggressive shade.

The Accidental Origin: Lipton's $0 Marketing Win

Every great meme has an unlikely origin story, and Kermit sipping tea is no exception. In early 2014, Lipton partnered with The Muppets for a commercial campaign encouraging people to "be more tea" — meaning more kind, more chill, more collected. The ad featured Kermit's tea-sipping saving Miss Piggy's chaotic dinner party, and it debuted during the 2014 Academy Awards broadcast.

The commercial itself was forgettable. But the image it produced — Kermit, green felt and all, casually holding a glass of iced tea with the relaxed confidence of someone who knows exactly what they're doing — was not. Lipton spent real ad dollars to create what would become one of the most-used reaction images in internet history. They got zero credit for it. The irony is almost too perfect for a meme about minding your own business.

June 2014: Instagram's Hostile Takeover

The meme didn't simmer — it detonated. Here's the timeline:

• Early 2014: Instagram users began posting Kermit images under #kermitmemes, mostly without the tea-sipping tagline.
• June 17, 2014: The @kermitbelike Instagram account posted the earliest known image macro combining Kermit's tea-sipping pose with "that's none of my business" — a post mocking people described as "ratchet."
• June 20, 2014: The @thatsnoneofmybusinesstho Instagram feed launched. It gained 130,000 followers in four days.
• Same day: Twitter hashtags #NoneOfMyBusiness and #Kermit racked up 19,000 and 11,000 mentions respectively in under a week.
• June 22, 2014: The Tumblr blog "Kermit the Snitch" launched, curating the best examples.
• June 23, 2014: A YouTube compilation by Bugatti Beez hit 100,000 views in 24 hours.

By the end of June, there were over 2,100 images under #kermitmemes on Instagram alone. The format was irresistible: set up an observation about someone's questionable behavior, drop "but that's none of my business," and let Kermit's serene tea-sipping do the rest.

Why This Meme Works: The Art of Plausible Deniability

Most memes express a single emotion — surprise, frustration, joy. Kermit sipping tea expresses something far more complex: the pleasure of judgment disguised as indifference. That's a very specific human experience, and before this meme, there wasn't a clean visual shorthand for it.

The structure is what makes it addictive. You get to say something cutting — "You post #GymLife but I saw you at McDonald's three times this week" — then retreat behind the safety of "but that's none of my business." It's the meme equivalent of gossiping behind a church fan. The tea makes it literal: you're spilling tea (slang for gossip) while drinking tea.

And then there's Kermit himself. He's a children's character, universally recognized and inherently non-threatening. When a green felt frog delivers your shade, it softens the blow just enough to feel like comedy rather than cruelty. That duality — sweetness and savagery — is the engine that's kept this meme running for over a decade.

LeBron's Championship Flex and the #TeaLizard Incident

The meme got a massive second life on June 20, 2016, when LeBron James led the Cleveland Cavaliers to their first-ever NBA championship. LeBron returned home wearing an "Ultimate Warrior" t-shirt and — crucially — a baseball cap embroidered with Kermit sipping tea.

He posted the hat alongside the Larry O'Brien Trophy on Instagram with a caption aimed squarely at his critics. It was perhaps the highest-profile deployment of the meme in its history: a real-world, physical-object flex using a meme about pretending not to care, by a man who very clearly cared and had just won.

The moment got even better when ABC's Good Morning America tweeted about it using the hashtag #TeaLizard — misidentifying Kermit the Frog as a lizard on national television. The internet responded with exactly the energy you'd expect, and #TeaLizard briefly became its own meme. USA Today, Washington Post, GQ, and the New York Daily News all covered LeBron's meme fashion choice, which says something about how deeply embedded this image was in popular culture by 2016.

Evil Kermit: The Dark Side Sequel

In November 2016, Kermit spawned a worthy successor: Evil Kermit (a.k.a. Dark Kermit). The format features Kermit facing his hooded doppelgänger — actually Constantine, the villain from Muppets Most Wanted (2014) — who whispers terrible advice.

While tea-sipping Kermit judges other people's behavior, Evil Kermit judges yours — or rather, encourages it. "Me: I should save money this month. Me to me: Treat yourself, you deserve it." The two memes are philosophical opposites: one is about the joy of external judgment, the other about internal self-sabotage. Together, they make Kermit the most psychologically complex meme character in internet history.

The Legacy: From Instagram to AI Search to Your Group Chat

More than a decade after its debut, Kermit sipping tea remains one of the most universally understood reaction images on the internet. Its longevity comes from its versatility — the format works for anything from petty relationship drama to geopolitical commentary. The phrase "but that's none of my business" has entered everyday speech as a meme reference even among people who've never seen the original image.

The meme also accidentally popularized "tea" as slang for gossip in mainstream culture (though the slang predates the meme in Black and drag communities). And Kermit's tea-sipping pose has been referenced in everything from corporate social media accounts to political memes to — yes — LeBron James's wardrobe.