Elon Musk tweeted a photo Monday night that shows him logged into his Twitter account, telling content creators how they can enable monetization features on Twitter. Unfortunately for Musk, people weren’t paying much attention to the fact that he had 24.7,000 paid subscribers – instead, some users realized he appeared to be logged into another account. And upon further investigation, it appeared the account belonged to @ErmnMusk, a now-deleted account with the display name “Elon Test”, which used a photo of Musk’s three-year-old son as an avatar.
Is this really Elon Musk’s engraver account? We’re hesitant to make that definitive statement (and if we tried to ask Twitter or Musk himself for comment, we’d just get a poo emoji in response). But there is evidence that makes this theory more plausible than not.
Many of the tweets about this possible burner account were fairly mundane, including tweets about having no followers (the last we saw before the account was deleted, it had since been followed by over 27,000 people. Whoops !). But some messages get a little uncomfortable.
When Bitcoin proponent Michael Saylor tweeted about Satoshi – the pseudonymous figure who developed Bitcoin – @ErmnMusk replied, “Do you like Japanese girls?
In another tweet, @ErmnMusk responded to a post mocking the former CEO of Alameda Research Caroline Ellisonwho dated the founder of FTX Sam Bankman Fried. She pleaded guilty to billions of dollars in wire fraud amid FTX’s collapse, prompting a user to mock Ellison’s appearance while crudely implying that Bankman Fried risked his billionaire status for sex. @ErmnMusk replied, “I 💜 librarians.”
In other tweets, it appeared @ErmnMusk was pretending to be X, Musk’s two-year-old son X Æ A-XII, whom he calls X.
During FTX’s collapse, Airbnb founder Brian Chesky tweeted, “Looks like we’re in a nightclub and the lights just came on.” @ErmnMusk replied, “I wish I was old enough to go to nightclubs. They sound so much fun. In another tweet, @ErmnMusk posted: ‘Finally turning 3 on May 4th!’ corresponds to the actual date of birth of X.
Could Musk just be trolling everyone? Of course. But beyond the fact that these tweets echo Musk’s general online behavior, there’s more evidence that it could be Musk’s burner account. The account was created shortly after Musk bought Twitter, and by VICE reports, the image of X — downloaded on November 29, 2022 – does not appear to have appeared anywhere else online before then (within hours it has since proliferated on Twitter, where many users impersonate the now-deleted account). Programmer Travis Brown fired 99 “profile snapshots” of the account, which show that he used the name “Elon Test” for most of his existence, except when he used the name “Star Sapphire”.
So how bad is it really that Musk possibly leaked his own burner account? Hey, we’ve all been there! Sometimes you accidentally leak your burner account where you alternate between role-playing as a toddler and making rude comments about women.