Elon Musk tweeted a photo on Monday night that shows him logged into his Twitter account, advertising to content creators how they can activate monetization features on Twitter. Unfortunately for Musk, people weren’t paying much attention to the fact that he has 24.7K paid subscribers — instead, some users realized that he appeared to be logged into another account. And upon deeper investigation, it looked like 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 its avatar.
Is this really Elon Musk’s burner account? We’re hesitant to make that definitive claim (and if we tried to ask for comment from Twitter or Musk himself, we would simply receive a poop emoji in response). But there is evidence that makes this theory seem more plausible than not.
Many of the tweets on this possible burner account were quite mundane, including tweets about having no followers (last we saw before the account was deleted, it had since been followed by over 27,000 people. Whoops!). But some posts get a bit uncomfortable.
When Bitcoin promoter Michael Saylor tweeted about Satoshi — the pseudonymous figure who developed Bitcoin — @ErmnMusk replied, “Do you like Japanese girls?”
In another tweet, @ErmnMusk replied to a post making fun of former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, who dated FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. She pled guilty to billions of dollars in wire fraud amid the FTX collapse, prompting one user to make fun of Ellison’s appearance while crudely implying that Bankman-Fried risked his billionaire status for sex. @ErmnMusk replied, “I 💜 librarians.”
In some other tweets, it seemed like @ErmnMusk was pretending to be X, Musk’s two-year-old son X Æ A-XII, who he calls X.
During the FTX collapse, Airbnb founder Brian Chesky tweeted, “It feels like we were in a nightclub and the lights just turned on.” @ErmnMusk replied, “I wish I was old enough to go to nightclubs. They sound so fun.” In another tweet, @ErmnMusk posted, “I will finally turn 3 on May 4th!”, which is consistent with X’s actual birth date.
Could Musk just be trolling everyone? Sure. But beyond the fact that these tweets very much echo Musk’s general online demeanor, there’s more evidence that this could be Musk’s burner account. The account was created soon after Musk purchased Twitter, and per VICE’s reporting, the image of X — uploaded on November 29, 2022 — doesn’t seem to have appeared anywhere else online before this (in a few short hours, it has since proliferated across Twitter, where many users are impersonating the now-deleted account). Programmer Travis Brown pulled 99 “profile snapshots” of the account, which show that it has used the name “Elon Test” for most of its existence, except for when it 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 just accidentally leak your burner account where you alternate between roleplaying as a toddler and making gross comments about women.
